UK Daily News Index

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Our daily newspaper-based Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) Index for the United Kingdom draws on the digital archives of the Access World News NewsBank service.

This service includes coverage of about 650 U.K. newspapers, ranging from large national papers like the Guardian to small local newspapers across the United Kingdom. Our Daily UK EPU Index runs from the beginning of 2001 to the present.

To construct the index, we obtain the daily count of articles that contain at least one term from each of three term sets. The first term set is economic or economy. The second set is uncertain or uncertainty. The third set is spending, deficit, regulation, budget, tax, policy, or Bank of England.

The number of newspapers that NewsBank covers has drastically increased over time. To correct for this growth we scale the number of economic policy uncertainty articles by the total count of all articles (in the same set of newspapers). Finally, we normalize this index so that its average value in 2015 matches the average 2015 value of our UK monthly index.