Türkiye Economic Uncertainty Index

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We are pleased to host indexes of economic policy uncertainty for Türkiye developed by Ilhan Kilic and Faruk Balli.

A new measure for uncertainty that affects the economy is proposed, constructed, and applied to Türkiye. We have constructed an index of Economic Country-Specific Uncertainty (ECSU) that is in line with the methodology used in constructing economic policy uncertainty indexes by Baker et al. (2016). Since economic uncertainty is of the Knightian type, the essence of measuring it lies in counting the frequency of joint appearances of words related to economics and uncertainty in Turkish-language newspapers.

To achieve this, we accessed the digital archives of six leading newspapers, namely Cumhuriyet, Dünya, Hürriyet, Milliyet, Sabah, and Zaman, to obtain the sets of terms for the horizon between January 2006 and December 2016 from the Turkish media. Since the publication of Zaman was closed down by government forces in the middle of July 2016, we replaced Zaman with Habertürk from 28 July 2016 to 31 December 2016. For the horizon between January 2017 and July 2025, we accessed the digital archives of six leading Turkish newspapers, say Cumhuriyet, Dünya, Hürriyet, Milliyet, Sabah, and Sözcü. Consequently, we constructed the index by counting the terms used each day in these newspapers, looking at how many newspaper articles contain the keywords from the descriptors of {economy} and {uncertainty}.

More precisely, in order to construct the ECSU Index as an economic uncertainty measure for Türkiye, the duple of 'economy' and 'uncertainty' was searched in each newspaper for each day, as Alexopoulos and Cohen (2009), Haddow et al. (2013), Ferreira et al. (2019), and Pan et al. (2022) counted. We coded ECSU=1 in the index if at least one term from each descriptor in this duple was counted in the same edition of a newspaper on one day. These were our criteria in essence.

The monthly time series of the ECSU index is available online here. The index will be updated regularly. You can also read the full article on the technical details of the ECSU index by clicking the link at https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-024-02594-z.