The Employment of Text Analytics in Pacific Islands Countries

November 1st, 2023

Economic Policy Uncertainty¶

  • Baker, Bloom, and Davis (2016) published an article on QJE, named "Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty", which has been cited more than 9800 times on Google Scholar.
  • They found that "innovations in policy uncertainty foreshadow declines in investment, output, and employment in the United States and, in a panel vector autoregressive setting, for 12 major economies."
  • The following newspapers are used in creating the EPU Index:
    • Solomon Islands: Solomon Stars, Solomon Times, The Island Sun, Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation, ABC AU, RNZ.
    • Papua New Guinea: Post Courier, ABC AU, RNZ.
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How to calculate the EPU index

  • Define three buckets of words;
    • Economic: economy/economic/economics/business/commerce/finance/financial/industry
    • Policy: government/governmental/authorities/minister/ministry/parliament/parliamentary/tax/regulation/legislation/central bank/cbsi/imf/world bank/international monetary fund/debt
    • Uncertainty: uncertain/uncertainty/uncertainties/unknown/unstable/unsure/undetermined/risk/risky/not certain/non-reliable
  • Find the scaled count of EPU news ($X_{it} = \frac{EPU news}{All news}$) for newspaper $i$ for time $t$;
  • Get the standard deviation $\sigma_i$ for each newspaper $i$ at time $T_1$;
  • Standardize $X_{it}$ by dividing $\sigma_i$ for all time $t$, giving a $Y_{it}$;
  • Compute the mean over newspapers of $Y_{it}$ in each month to obtain the series $Z_t$;
  • Compute $M$, the mean value of $Z_t$ for $T_1$;
  • Multiply $Z_t$ by (100/$M$) for all t to obtain the normalized EPU time-series index;

Topic Modeling¶

Latent dirichlet allocation (LDA) is a frequently employed methods for topic modeling.

  • We trained LDA model on the above-mentioned local newspapers in Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.
  • The right panel displays the identified 16 topics in Papua New Guinea. For example:
    • Topic 10 is about business, specifically mentioned coffee, cocoa, and tourism.
    • Topic 5 mentioned assistance, training, and knowledge.
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display(HTML(png_topic))

Sentiment Analysis¶

Sentiment Analysis

  • Sentiment Analysis is frequently employed in natural language processing;
  • In gist, it calculates a score from -1 to +1, reflecting not only the direction but also the intensity of emotions embedded in a corpus.
  • Below uses the above-mentioned four newspapers:
    • Calculate the sentiment compound score for each news and get a monthly average, $X_{it}$ for each newspaper $i$ at time $t$;
    • Get an average over four newspapers, yielding a time-series sentiment score $S_t$
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WorkFlow

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Economic Related Sentiment in Papua New Guinea

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Economic Related Sentiment in Solomon Islands

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Google Trends¶

  • Google Trends enable us to get a list of top topics that were searched along with the requested term in a specified geographical locations.

  • For example, if one search "jobs in lae" in Papua New Guinea, the related search terms include: lae biscuit co. Ltd, mining, nestle, kina bank limited, Coca-Cola, and brewery.

  • The term "job in port moresby" yields hospitality, Waigani, officer, hilton, Stanley hotel & suites, etc.

Related Search Graph for Jobs

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display(HTML(png_job_network))
Bokeh Plot