Energy Transportation Uncertainty Index
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The construction of the global energy transportation uncertainty index follows Baker et al. (2016) methodology for search-based indices. This approach measures the frequency of news articles containing keywords from three distinct semantic categories across over 40 major English-language newspapers worldwide using the Factiva database, including The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Globe and Mail. See Table 4 in the appendix for the complete list of sources with their coverage.
- Energy (E): oil, gas, petroleum, energy
- Transportation (T): midstream, pipeline$1, transport*, rail*, barge$1, tanker$1, truck*, shipping, storage, terminal$1, infrastructure
- Uncertainty (U): threat*, warn*, fear*, risk*, concern*
For an article to be classified as reflecting a threat to energy transportation, a keyword from the energy-related block must appear in the headline or leading paragraphs and a word from the first (E) and second groups (T) must be present within a range of 5 words of each other. Additionally, the article must have a word count exceeding 150 words.
Articles that are summaries of news, corporate digests, calendars, rankings, routine general and market news, news agency materials, letters, headline-only content, personal announcements, contract tenders, obituaries, and TV/Radio listings are excluded to remove irrelevant articles. This text-based procedure ensures accurate identification of articles related to disruptions in the midstream of the energy industry.
The construction involves three steps. First, raw ETU counts are divided by total articles in each newspaper-month. Second, these scaled counts are standardized using each newspaper's standard deviation calculated over its entire available time series. Third, the standardized values are averaged across all available newspapers in each month and normalized to mean 100 over the full sample period.
The paper can be referenced as: Hugo Morão, The economic effects of tensions in energy transportation, Research in Transportation Economics, August 2025, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.retrec.2025.101598