UK Historical News-Based Policy Index

Download UK Historical EPU Data

This index reflects data from two major newspapers from the United Kingdom, the Times of London and the Guardian.

To construct the index, we perform month-by-month searches of each paper, starting in January of 1900, for terms related to economic policy uncertainty. In particular, we search for articles containing the term 'uncertainty' or 'uncertain', the terms 'economic', 'economy', 'business', 'commerce', 'industry', and 'industrial' as well as one or more of the following terms: 'tax', 'policy', 'regulation', 'spending', 'deficit', 'budget', 'Bank of England', 'war', or 'tariff'. In other words, to meet our criteria for inclusion the article must include terms in all three categories pertaining to uncertainty, the economy and policy.

To deal with changing volumes of news articles for a given paper over time, we divide the raw counts of policy uncertainty articles by the total number of news articles in the paper for a given month. We standardize each newspaper-level scaled series to unit standard deviation from 1900 to 2008 and then average across the two papers by month. Finally, we normalize the two-paper series to a mean of 100 from 1900 to 2008.