Brazil Monthly Index

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We are pleased to introduce a new Economic Policy Uncertainty Index for Brazil that runs from January 1991 to the present.

News coverage about policy-related economic uncertainty

We construct the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index for Brazil in the same manner as our newspaper-based EPU Index for the United States, following the methods in "Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty" by Baker, Bloom and Davis.

We use text archives for the newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo from 1991 onwards. In each month, we count the number of articles containing the terms "incerto" or "incerteza", "econômico" or "economia", and one or more of the following policy-relevant terms: regulação, déficit, orçamento, imposto, banco central, alvorada, planalto, congresso, senado, câmara dos deputados, legislação, lei, tarifa.

To obtain the EPU rate, we scale the raw EPU counts by the number of all articles in the same newspaper and month. We multiplicatively rescale the resulting series to a mean of 100 from January 1991 to December 2011.

We thank Emanuel Ornelas, Claudio Ferraz, Sergio Lamucci, and Jose Scheinkman for helpful comments on a preliminary version of our EPU Index for Brazil.