ABSTRACT
In the following three chapters I examine three potential explanations for the attempts made by governments to influence wage formation processes as discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. The present chapter focuses on the shift in monetary policy since the 1970s. The core argument is that governments have tended to employ corporatist policy approaches in order to strengthen the credibility of their monetary policy, particularly in situations where the preconditions for a credible monetary policy were weak. Government intervention thus serves as a policy instrument of governments for conveying a new economic policy. The argument is supported by a strong statistical correlation between an index measuring the legal independence of central banks and the index for government intervention developed in Chapter 3.
