Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty in Pakistan

Ali Choudhary, Farooq Pasha and Mohsin Waheed

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We develop an economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index for Pakistan in accordance with Baker, Bloom and Davis (2016) by extracting newspaper articles from Websites (i.e., Web-scraping) and we divided this into two indices. The main index, is based on four leading English-language Pakistan newspapers for the period of January 2015 to April 2020. To cover more historical ground, we also present a second index which uses two of the four newspapers and for which Web harvesting is plausible for a longer period of August 2010 to April 2020. The two indices are highly correlated thus they move in tandem and between them they capture events such as: the great floods of 2010; high terrorism activity; heightened exchange rate volatility; political turmoil; reshuffling of economic managers; the IMF program of 2019, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic.

Keywords: Uncertainty Index; Developing Economy; Event Study (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D80 E22 E66 G18 L50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-05-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:100013

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