Climate Policy Uncertainty Index for Pakistan

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Following Baker, Bloom, and Davis (2016), Syed, Mohsin, and Saleh (2024) have constructed the climate policy uncertainty (CPU) index for Pakistan. Climate policy uncertainty measures level of uncertainty related to climate policies, regulations, and government actions that affect households, firms, investors, and the economy. The two variants of CPU for Pakistan are as follows:.

• CPU-2: This index is based on frequency count in two leading newspapers (Business Recorder and Express Tribune) available from August 2010.
• CPU-4: This index is based on frequency count in four leading newspapers (Business Recorder, Express Tribune, DAWN, and the News) available from January 2015.

To construct their CPU-2 and CPU-4 index, they first obtain monthly counts of articles for each newspaper that contain one or more terms in each of the following sets (sets in parentheses):

• ("uncertainty" or "uncertain", or "uncertainties")
• ("carbon dioxide" or "climate" or "climate risk" or "greenhouse gas emissions" or "greenhouse" or "greenhouse emissions" or "GHG" or "CO2" or "emissions" or "global warming" or "climate change" or "green energy" or "renewable energy" or "environmental" or "net zero" or "net carbon" or "net-zero" or "net-carbon" or "environmental coordination")
• ("regulation" or "regulatory" or "regulator" or "legislation" or "Parliament" or "Government" or "Senate" or "EPA" or "law" or "policy" or "policies" or "strategy" or "Strategies" or "Framework" or "Plan" or "Action" or "Pak-EPA" or "Pak EPA")

After obtaining raw counts of articles, they scale by total number of articles published in the same newspaper and month. Next, they standardize each newspaper's scaled frequency counts to have a unit standard deviation from August 2010 to March 2025 (for CPU-2) and from January 2015 to March 2025 (for CPU-4) and then compute the simple average across newspapers by month. Finally, they multiplicatively normalize the series to have a mean value of 100 for the respective time periods of CPU-2 and CPU-4.

The data should be cited as: SYED, A. A. S., WAHEED, M., and SALEH, S. (2024). MEASURING CLIMATE AND CLIMATE POLICY UNCERTAINTY FOR PAKISTAN. Pakistan Journal of Applied Economics, 34(2), 71-92.