The founding model of the ECB, as advocated by the German government, is explained in an article published in 1983 by two economists, Robert Barro and David Gordon. According to them, the best way to combat the inflationary bias is for central banks to be credible. This credibility would be all the more important if the central banks were independent, so that decisions are not "contaminated" by politics. For economists, central banks should then have only one objective: to maintain a low inflation rate. For this system to work, it would then be necessary to assume that a monetary policy conducted in this way would have no effect on the real economy.