Morocco Economic Uncertainty Index

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We are pleased to host a new EPU index for Morocco developed by Oussama Houari in "Policy Uncertainty and Macroeconomic Dynamics: A New Index for Morocco". His procedure follows the index construction methods in "Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty" by Scott R. Baker, Nicholas Bloom and Steven J. Davis.

The Moroccan EPU index reflects frequency counts of articles published in seven major Moroccan newspapers, both in French (Le Matin, La Nouvelle Tribune, L'Économiste, Le Desk, and Libération) and Arabic (Al-Ahdath Al-Maghribiya and Bayane Al-Yaoume), from January 2015 to the present. Specifically, for each month and newspaper, the author counts articles that contain one or more terms in each of the following three categories:

• Economy (E) - econom*
• Policy (P) - fiscal*, fiscal policy, monetary, monetary policy, parliament*, law*, legisla*, central bank, Bank Al-Maghrib, bam, interest rate, policy rate, govern*, tax*, ministr*, financ*, regulat*, reform*, deficit*, budget*, public spending, treasury charges, public revenue, treasury revenue, treasury resources, public debt, treasury debt, sovereign debt
• Uncertainty (U) - uncertain*

See Section 2 for more information and Table 1 of "Policy Uncertainty and Macroeconomic Dynamics: A New Index for Morocco" for the complete list of E, P, and U terms.

Thereafter, the raw EPU counts are scaled by the total number of articles in the same newspaper and month. Next, the author standardizes each paper's scaled monthly counts by dividing by its standard deviation from January 2015 to March 2025. Finally, he averages the standardized values over newspapers by month to obtain a single time series, which is normalized to a mean of 100 from January 2015 to March 2025.