Using Text Analysis to Gauge the Reasons for Respondents' Assessment in the Economy Watchers Survey

Tomoaki Mikami, Hiroaki Yamagata and Jouchi Nakajima
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Tomoaki Mikami: Bank of Japan
Hiroaki Yamagata: Bank of Japan

No 21-E-2, Bank of Japan Research Laboratory Series from Bank of Japan

Abstract: The Economy Watchers Survey released monthly by the Cabinet Office provides not only the headline diffusion index of the economic assessment of survey respondents (so-called "economy watchers") but also textual data from respondents' comments giving reasons for their assessment. Employing such data, this article presents an example of the use of text analysis, which has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Following Tsuruga and Okazaki (2017) and Otaka and Kan (2018), we construct co-occurrence network diagrams to explore what issues economy watchers focus on. The co-occurrence network diagrams drawn using data for mid-2021 show that economy watchers mainly focused on the State of Emergency and business restrictions related to COVID-19, developments in the vaccination process, and the shortage of semiconductors for automobile production. Our analysis shows that textual data are useful for an assessment of the economy; it is important to make efforts to improve text analysis methods.

Keywords: Big data; Text analysis; Economy Watchers Survey; Co-occurrence network diagram (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-12-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big and nep-cmp
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