Svitlana Brus

The relevance of trust in the central bank is determined by the rapid growth of the gap between the expectations of a regulator and market participants regardless of the reforms carried out by the NBU. Therefore, the need to use the “non-traditional” monetary policy instruments has enhanced the role of verbal interventions in the context of inflation targeting. The aim of the article is to ground that trust causes adequate rational behavior of the market participants in response to the central bank’s communication policy. The type of this research is an explanatory research method. As determined, trust is the necessary condition for the effectiveness of the central bank’s communication strategy and it favors the achievement of proclaimed objectives. It is established that although since 2014 the NBU activated verbal interventions as an additional instrument to anchor expectations, the increase of transparency does not prompt the trust because of the lack of confidence of citizens in the NBU and high level of stress in the domestic financial sector. It is emphasized that the pursuit of inflation targeting requires expanded communication to gather the expectations of economic agents. The NBU, in its communication policy concerning the economic climate, underlines devaluation expectations, the exchange rate and explanations on the discount rate. However, the deviation of expected enterprises’ exchange rate from the actual exchange rate, growing velocity of money circulation against the declining share of funds involved in the banking system, low monetization level and low penetration of financial services evidence the distrust in monetary policy.

The pandemic and wartime in Ukraine confirmed the importance of cashless payments for financial stability. The purpose of the paper is to examine the effect of technological infrastructure and financial access factors on cashless economy development. The impact of the infrastructure factor is assessed in case of Ukraine, using NBU’s data on payment infrastructure during 2001–2022. The hypothesis of the boosting effect of financial access towards a cashless economy has been tested using the method of correlation between M0/M3 and different indicators of financial access (usage of essential technologies, financial services) based on data of World Bank, IMF, and Triple-A in 2021.
The study’s results show that globally there is an almost linear relationship between the number of open financial accounts and the increase in the level of cashless (0.954). It is also revealed that the rise of the share of the population making electronic payments decreases the share of cash in the economy. It is determined that the spread of the crypto-assets has a significant impact on the reduction of cash in the economy (an increase in the share of the population operating with cryptocurrencies by 1% reduces the share of cash by 0.5%). Regarding regulatory policies, it is proposed to stimulate the coverage of the population with open financial accounts, making mandatory payments with electronic payment systems and developing their infrastructure.