Central Bank Policy Rate
The Central Bank Policy Rate is the interest rate that a central bank sets on its loans and advances to a commercial bank. This interest rate is used by the monetary authorities to control inflation and stabilize the country’s currency.
Data comes from the Global Macro Database (GMDB), further information about the variable can be found within https://www.globalmacrodata.com/documentation.html
The rate is annual and expressed as a decimal fraction per annum (0.0538 for 5.375%), taken at the end of the year rather than averaged over it.
Changed in v2.2.0: this used to be returned in percentage points (5.375 for 5.375%). It is now a decimal fraction, matching every other rate in the Finance Toolkit.
Also known as: policy rate, benchmark rate, base rate.
Central Bank Policy Rate in Python
Install the Finance Toolkit with:
pip install financetoolkit -U
Then call get_central_bank_policy_rate as shown below.
from financetoolkit import Economics
economics = Economics(start_date='2021-01-01', end_date='2025-12-31')
economics.get_central_bank_policy_rate(countries=['Netherlands', 'Germany', 'United States'])
Which returns:
| Netherlands | Germany | United States | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | -0.005 | -0.005 | 0.0012 |
| 2022 | 0.0044 | 0.0044 | 0.0438 |
| 2023 | 0.0362 | 0.0362 | 0.0538 |
| 2024 | 0.0381 | 0.0381 | 0.0438 |
| 2025 | 0.0288 | 0.0288 | 0.0426 |
Parameters
The function accepts the following parameters:
- countries (list[str] | str | None, optional): The countries to include in the data. Defaults to None.
- rolling (int, optional): The rolling window size to use for smoothing the data (simple moving average). Defaults to None.
- trailing (int, optional): The trailing window size to use for summing the data over trailing periods (e.g. a trailing-4-quarter sum). Defaults to None.
- growth (bool, optional): Whether to return the growth data or the actual data. Defaults to False.
- lag (int, optional): The number of periods to lag the growth data. Defaults to 1.
- standardize (bool, optional): Whether to standardize (Z-Score) the result. When combined with growth=True, standardizes the growth values instead of the raw values. Defaults to False.
- rounding (int | None, optional): The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None.