Formation Of Indonesia Economic Policy Uncertainty Index For 2014-2021

Abstract

This research uses information in printed newspapers to create a proxy for measuring uncertainty by forming Indonesia Economic Policy Uncertainty Index for 2014-2021. The index was built by analyzing an extensive data set of articles containing the terms ‘economics’ and ‘uncertainty’ in Bahasa. The text-mining topic modeling method of the Latent Dirichlet was applied to look for terms in the articles that referenced ‘policy.’ Based on the frequency of article publication, an index with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 1 was created. The IEPU index topics consist of eight main policy categories; monetary, fiscal, trade, domestic regulation, international regulation, geopolitics, energy/ resources, and politics. In addition, its movement can be described based on economic uncertainty events that happened on the timeline. This research also compares the formed index with pre-existing uncertainty indices, namely the VIX index, the GEPU index, and the WUI index for Indonesia.

Keywords: Uncertainty, Policy, Volatility, Text-Mining