Singapore Monthly Index

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We are pleased to release a monthly index of Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) for Singapore that runs from January 2003 to the present. The Singapore EPU Index is a trade-weighted average of national EPU indices for 21 countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, France, Germany, Greece, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Each national EPU index reflects the relative frequency of own-country newspaper articles that contain a trio of terms pertaining to the economy (E), policy (P) and uncertainty (U). In other words, each monthly national EPU index value is proportional to the share of own-country newspaper articles that discuss economic policy uncertainty in that month. For a detailed discussion of how we construct the national EPU indices, see Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty.

To construct the Singapore EPU index, we proceed as follows: First, we re-normalize each national EPU Index to a mean of 100 from 1997 (or first year) to 2015. Second, we compute the Singapore EPU Index value for each month as the trade-weighted average of the 21 national EPU index values. To compute the time-varying trade weights, we use the sum of Singapore's annual import flows plus export flows for these 21 countries.

We thank Hannah Ni and Asher Rose for assistance in constructing the Singapore Economic Policy Uncertainty Index.