Canada Monthly Index

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To measure Canadian policy-related economic uncertainty, we construct an index based on newspaper articles regarding policy uncertainty.

News coverage about policy-related economic uncertainty

We construct this index in a similar manner as our index based on American newspapers. Here we include 5 Canadian newspapers: The Gazette, The Vancouver Sun, The Toronto Star, The Ottawa Citizen, and The Globe and Mail. Additionally, we include articles from the Canadian Newswire.

As with our American newspaper index, we utilize the number of news articles containing the terms uncertain or uncertainty, economic or economy, as well as policy relevant terms (scaled by the smoothed number of articles containing 'today'). Policy relevant terms include: 'policy', 'tax', 'spending', 'regulation', 'central bank', 'budget', and 'deficit'.

Each paper-specific monthly series is normalized to standard deviation 1 prior to 2011 and then summed across papers, by month. Finally, the series is normalized to mean 100 prior to 2011.

With each monthly update, data from the preceding two months may be revised slightly, as well. This is driven by the fact that some online newspapers do not immediately update their online archives with all articles, leading to slightly changing totals for the previous 1-2 months.

An older vintage of the index, including data from Consensus Economics through March 2014, is also found in the downloadable data above.