Portugal Policy Uncertainty Index

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The construction of Portugal's economic policy 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 major Portuguese-language newspapers using the Factiva database, including Jornal de Notícias, Correio da Manhã, Jornal de Negócios, Expresso, and Observador. See Table B5 in the appendix for the complete list of sources with their specific coverage periods.

• Economic (E): economi*, macroeconomi*
• Policy (P): parlamento, assembleia da república, govern*, ministério das finanças, comissão europeia, défice, orçament*, imposto$1 (with proximity to articles: o, de, do, um, por, este, esse, aquele), legisla*, regula*, burocracia*, lei, leis
• Uncertainty (U): incert*, instabil*, indefini*, indecis*, imprev?si*, insegur*, risco$1

For an article to be classified as reflecting economic policy uncertainty, it must contain terms from all three categories (E AND P AND U). Articles must have a word count between 100 and 2000 words.

Articles that are summaries, corporate digests, calendars, rankings, market figures, news agency materials, editorial cartoons, headline-only content, regional news, letters, personal announcements, obituaries, TV listings, or industrial exchange data are excluded to remove irrelevant articles.

The construction involves three steps. First, raw EPU 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, An economic policy uncertainty index for Portugal, International Economics, August 2024, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.inteco.2024.100481