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	Central Bank Independence Index	Rent-Seeking Analysis
Field	Political Economy	Political Economy
Family	Process / pipeline	MCDM
Year of origin	1992	1967
Originator	Alex Cukierman, Steven B. Webb & Bilin Neyapti	Gordon Tullock & Anne Krueger
Type	Composite institutional index	Formal model of political-economic waste
Seminal source	Cukierman, A., Webb, S. B., & Neyapti, B. (1992). Measuring the Independence of Central Banks and Its Effect on Policy Outcomes. World Bank Economic Review, 6(3), 353-398.	Tullock, G. (1967). The Welfare Costs of Tariffs, Monopolies, and Theft. Western Economic Journal, 5(3), 224-232.
Aliases	CWN Index, Cukierman CBI Index, Legal Central Bank Independence Index, CBI Index	Rent-Seeking Theory, Tullock Rent-Seeking Analysis, Rent-Seeking Contest Model, Directly Unproductive Profit-Seeking
Related	2	4
Summary	The central bank independence index of Cukierman, Webb, and Neyapti (1992) is the foundational quantitative measure of how insulated a monetary authority is from political control. It reads the central bank's statute and codes dozens of legal provisions into four groups — the appointment, tenure, and dismissal of the chief executive; who holds authority over monetary policy formulation and conflict resolution; the bank's statutory objectives, especially the primacy of price stability; and the limits on the bank's lending to government — then scores each provision on a zero-to-one scale and aggregates them with explicit weights into a legal independence index running from zero to one. To capture the gap between law and practice, the authors complement this de jure index with a de facto measure: the turnover rate of central bank governors. The framework launched the empirical literature linking institutional design to inflation performance.	Rent-seeking analysis is the political-economy framework for measuring the social waste created when individuals and firms spend real resources competing for artificially created rents — the extra income generated by monopoly grants, tariffs, licenses, quotas, and other government-conferred privileges — rather than producing new wealth. Gordon Tullock's 1967 article showed that the conventional Harberger triangle drastically understates the cost of monopoly and protection, because the rectangle of monopoly profit, far from being a mere transfer, becomes a prize that competitors will expend resources to capture. Anne Krueger named the activity 'rent-seeking' in 1974 and demonstrated its macroeconomic scale in regulated developing economies. The analysis models the competition for a rent as a contest and asks how much of the prize is dissipated in the struggle to win it.