World Uncertainty Index (WUI) reflects the frequency of the word “uncertainty” in the quarterly Economist Intelligence Unit country reports. It is an unbalanced panel of 143 individual countries on a quarterly basis from 1952, which is presented on an annual level in QoG datasets.
Globally, the Index spikes around major events like the Gulf War, the Euro debt crisis, the Brexit vote, and the COVID pandemic. The level of uncertainty is higher in developing countries but is more synchronized across advanced economies with their tighter trade and financial linkages.
Last updated by source: 2023-10-13
| Dataset type: | Time-Series |
| Dataset level: | Country |
(Ahir et al., 2022)
World Trade Uncertainty Index (WTUI) is constructed by counting the number of times uncertainty (and its variants) is mentioned, in proximity to a word related to trade, in the EIU country report. Specifically, the authors looked at the following words: protectionism, North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), tariff, trade, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and World Trade Organization (WTO). Examples of texts referring to trade uncertainty include: “uncertainty over the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement”, and “market uncertainty over future trade policy will weigh on investor sentiment”. As for the main index, they scale the index per thousand of words.
More about this variableWorld Uncertainty Index (WUI) was constructed for an unbalanced panel of 143 individual countries on a quarterly basis from 1952. This is the first attempt to construct a panel uncertainty index for a large set of developed and developing countries. The index reflects the frequencies of the word “uncertainty” (and its variants) in the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) country reports. To make the WUI comparable across countries, authors scale the raw counts by the total number of words in each report — the number of “uncertainty” words per thousand words.
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