Uncertainty Indices for Colombia
Download Data Annotated Colombia EPU Index
We are pleased to host newspaper-based indices of Economic Uncertainty and Economic Policy Uncertainty for Colombia developed by Daniel Perico.
Perico follows the methods in "Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty" by Scott Baker, Nick Bloom and Steven J. Davis to construct indices that run from January 1994 to December 2016, drawing on more than ten thousand articles from the online archive of El Tiempo, a leading national newspaper in Colombia.
Perico constructs indices of overall Economic Uncertainty (EU), local Economic Uncertainty (EUC), and local Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPUC) for Colombia using the categories and keywords listed in the table below. For example, to construct his EPUC index, he first obtains a monthly count of articles that contain at least one term from each of the E, P, U and C categories.
He then scales this raw EPUC count by the number of news articles in the same month. Next, he standardizes the scaled frequency counts to unit standard deviation from 1994 to 2016, and he normalizes the series to have a mean of 100 over the same period. For additional information on his index construction method, see his paper on "Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty in Colombia: A News Based Approach".
Perico would like to thank Prof. Jonas Dovern and Joćo Carlos Claudio for research supervision and valuable comments.
