The world uncertainty index

Hites Ahir, Nicholas Bloom and Davide Furceri

POID Working Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: We construct the World Uncertainty Index (WUI) for an unbalanced panel of 143 individual countries on a quarterly basis from 1952. This is the frequency of the word "uncertainty" in the quarterly Economist Intelligence Unit country reports. Globally, the Index spikes around major events like the Gulf War, the Euro debt crisis, the Brexit vote and the COVID pandemic. The level of uncertainty is higher in developing countries but is more synchronized across advanced economies with their tighter trade and financial linkages. In a panel vector auto regressive setting we find that innovations in the WUI foreshadow significant declines in output. This effect is larger and more persistent in countries with lower institutional quality, and in sectors with greater financial constraints.

Keywords: world uncertainty index; WUI; Economist Intelligence Unit; Gulf War; Brexit; Euro debit; Covid; pandemic; innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-12-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ifn and nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://poid.lse.ac.uk/textonly/publications/downloads/poidwp062.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The world uncertainty index (2022)
Working Paper: The world uncertainty index (2022)
Working Paper: The world uncertainty index (2022)
Working Paper: The World Uncertainty Index (2022)
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:cep:poidwp:062

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in POID Working Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().