Croatia Monthly Index

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We are pleased to host a new EPU index for Croatia developed by Petar Soric and Ivana Lolic in their paper, "Economic uncertainty and its impact on the Croatian economy".

Their index is based on the frequency of articles in leading Croatian newspapers (Jutarnji list, Vecernji list, and 24 sata) and news websites (index.hr, Poslovni dnevnik, and Dnevnik.hr), spanning from January 2003 to the present. They follow the index construction methods in "Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty" by Scott R. Baker, Nicholas Bloom and Steven J. Davis.

To construct the Croatian EPU index, they first identify articles that contain at least one term in each of the following three term sets:

For example, an article enters the quantification of their EPU index if it contains (in Croatian) at least one keyword from the Economics set, one from the Policy set, and one from the Uncertainty set.

The authors quantify the EPU index in several steps. First, they calculate the frequency of economic uncertainty-related articles in each month and scale them with the total number of articles in that month. The obtained shares are then standardized to have unit standard deviation over a period of January 2003 to December 2018, and averaged across media outlets. Finally, the index is normalized to have a mean of 100 in January 2003 to December 2018 for easier interpretation.

Since not all of the six media outlets have available news archives throughout the entire analyzed period, the authors calculate the EPU index for the period after January 2003, when at least two sources are available.

The time dynamics of Croatian EPU index is shown in the annotated chart. The construction of Croatian EPU index has been fully supported by the Croatian Science Foundation under project No. 4189.