Newspaper-based economic uncertainty indices for Poland

Using text mining and web scraping techniques, we develop newspaper-based economic uncertainty measures for Poland. We build ‘general’ economic and economic-policy uncertainty indices, as well as category-specific ones designed to capture e.g. the economic uncertainty related to fiscal policy or to stockmarket movements. Several types of evidence suggest that these indices do proxy for changes in economic uncertainty in Poland. In particular, our measures spike around uncertainty-laden events or periods, such as the initial phase of Poland’s post-communist economic transition, the global financial crisis or the European debt crisis that followed. Our indices also exhibit correlation with a variety of other indicators of economic uncertainty, such as financial-market data and results of corporate surveys. The newspaper-based indices behave similarly to uncertainty indicators developed using other textual data and are strongly correlated with relevant economic uncertainty indicators developed by other researchers.