The World Uncertainty Index

By Hitesh R. Ahir, Nicholas Bloom, Davide Furceri. Social Science Research Network, 2018

953 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We construct a new index of uncertainty — the World Uncertainty Index (WUI) — for 143 individual countries on a quarterly basis from 1996 onwards. This is defined using the frequency of the word “uncertainty” in the quarterly Economist Intelligent Unit country reports. Globally, the Index spikes near the 9/11 attack, SARS outbreak, Gulf War II, Euro debt crisis, El Nino, European border crisis, UK Brexit vote and the 2016 US election. Uncertainty spikes tend to be more synchronized within advanced economies and between economies with tighter trade and financial linkages. The level of uncertainty is significantly higher in developing countries and is positively associated with economic policy uncertainty and stock market volatility, and negatively with GDP growth. In a panel vector autoregressive setting, we find that innovations in the WUI foreshadow significant declines in output.

Subfields: Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4252cf4d45e952a6c4c7bec6b8af4b0a1db6bf38

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In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

1. F. Bekun
2. Festus Fatai Adedoyin
3. M. Agboola
4. Meng Qin
5. Yu-Chen Zhang
6. Chiwei Su
7. Ilhan Ozturk
8. P. Mizen

Citations in the corpus

• Economic uncertainty before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020, background): “See, also, the World Uncertainty Index of Ahir et al. (2019) at www.”
• Economic uncertainty and bank risk: Evidence from emerging economies (2020, neutral): “Multinational data of uncertainty are only published by the recent works of Ozturk and Sheng (2018) and Ahir et al. (2019).”
• The Essential Role of Pandemics: A Fresh Insight Into the Oil Market (2020, methodology): “Given this, we choose the (4), developed by Ahir et al. (2018)(5), to reflect the severity of global pandemic diseases.”
• The implications of renewable and non-renewable energy generating in Sub-Saharan Africa: The role of economic policy uncertainties (2021, background): “Energy Information Administration EPU World Uncertainty Index (WUI) (Ahir et al., 2018) LREN*EPU This variable is generated as an interaction term between renewable energy generation and economic policy uncertainty (Author calculation)”
• Macroeconomic Policy in the Time of COVID-19 (2020, background): “Indeed, measures of market and policy uncertainty are higher now than at the peak of the global financial crisis (Ahir, Bloom, and Furceri 2020; Baker, Boom, and Davis 2020).”
• The impact of economic uncertainty and geopolitical risks on bank credit (2021, neutral): “The WUI index captures uncertainty related to economic and political developments, regarding both short-term and long-term concerns (Ahir et al., 2018).”