Can media and text analytics provide insights into labour market conditions in China?

Jeannine Bailliu, Xinfen Han, Mark Kruger (), Yu-Hsien Liu and Sri Thanabalasingam

International Journal of Forecasting, 2019, vol. 35, issue 3, 1118-1130

Abstract: The official Chinese labour market indicators have been seen as problematic given their small cyclical movement and their only partial capture of the labour force. In our paper, we build a monthly Chinese labour market conditions index (LMCI) using text analytics applied to Mainland Chinese-language newspapers over the period from 2003 to 2017. We use a supervised machine learning approach by training a support vector machine classification model. The information content and the forecast ability of our LMCI are tested against official labour market activity measures in wage and credit growth estimations. Surprisingly, one of our findings is that the much-maligned official labour market indicators do contain information. However, their information content is not robust and, in many cases, our LMCI can provide forecasts that are significantly superior. Moreover, regional disaggregation of the LMCI illustrates that labour conditions in the export-oriented coastal region are sensitive to export growth, while those in inland regions are not. This suggests that text analytics can, indeed, be used to extract useful labour market information from Chinese newspaper articles.

Keywords: China; Labour markets; Inflation; Text analytics; Machine learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0169207019300524
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Chapter: Can media and text analytics provide insights into labour market conditions in China? (2019)
Working Paper: Can Media and Text Analytics Provide Insights into Labour Market Conditions in China? (2018)
Working Paper: Can media and text analytics provide insights into labour market conditions in China? (2018)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:intfor:v:35:y:2019:i:3:p:1118-1130

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijforecast.2019.03.003

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Forecasting is currently edited by R. J. Hyndman

More articles in International Journal of Forecasting from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().