The ECB's neglected secondary mandate: An inter-institutional solution

The ECB’s secondary mandate requires it to the support broader economic policies by and in the EU. Until recently absent from the ECB strategy, the secondary mandate features prominently in the ECB’s 2021 review of its monetary policy strategy. This report asks: How should the ECB interpret the many objectives that the secondary mandate mentions? And how should it act on them? A more prominent role for its secondary mandate fits well with the new, more political role of the ECB, but it should not act on the secondary mandate alone. Why is that? The requirements that the legal text imposes on the ECB are paradoxical and difficult to reconcile. We explain the paradox in terms of three features. Firstly, the secondary mandate is binding on the ECB so that it must support the EU’s economic policies where this is possible without prejudice to price stability. However and secondly, the secondary mandate is also highly indeterminate because there are many relevant secondary objectives and ways to support them. Acting on the secondary mandate requires prioritising objectives and designing new instruments. Yet, thirdly, the ECB lacks the competence to develop its own policies to pursue the secondary objectives. For the ECB to simply choose its own secondary objectives and act on them raises severe legal and democratic objections. To resolve this paradoxical situation, we propose that the specification of the secondary objectives should take place via high-level coordination with the political institutions of the EU. Unlike direct instructions which are illegal under EU law, coordination would be compatible with central bank independence and strengthen the ECB’s ability to pursue price stability. We propose three main avenues to give shape to such interinstitutional coordination.