Nigeria Economic Uncertainty Index

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We are delighted to host the economic policy uncertainty index for Nigeria developed by Tumala, Mohammed M., Omotosho, Babatunde S., Mohammed, Mohammed G., Musa, Murtala, and Eguasa, Bright E. in "Economic Policy Uncertainty Index for Nigeria". Their index follows the procedure in "Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty" by Scott R. Baker, Nick Bloom and Steven Davis.

Their EPU index is based on news articles published in five major newspapers in Nigeria, namely, Daily Trust, The Punch, Guardian, Business Day and Thisday. To construct their index, they first obtain raw monthly EPU article counts. Specifically, for each month and newspaper, they count articles that contain one or more terms in each of the following three categories:

• Economy (E) - economics, economy
• Policy (P)- monetary policy, fiscal policy, central bank, federal inland revenue service, policymakers, subsidy, ministry of budget and national planning, ministry of finance, regulation, national assembly, senate, house of representatives, deficit, government, reserves, taxes, tariffs, legislation
• Uncertainty (U)- uncertainty, uncertain, unpredictable, unclear, unstable. See Section 2.0 for more information and Table 1 of "Economic Policy Uncertainty Index for Nigeria" in particular for the complete list of E, P, and U terms.

They scale the raw EPU counts by the total number of articles in the same newspaper and month. Next, they standardize each paper's scaled monthly counts by dividing by its standard deviation to have a unit standard deviation from April 2016 to June 2023. Finally, they average the standardized values over newspapers by month to obtain a single time series, which they normalize to a mean of 100 from April 2016 to June 2023.