Central Asia Trade Policy Uncertainty Index

Keyword identification and index construction

Following the economic policy uncertainty framework of Baker, Bloom & Davis (2016), CA-TPU uses three groups of Russian word stems to accommodate the language’s rich inflection: trade (T: торговля, экспорт, импорт, таможня, тариф, пошлина, санкции, транзит, квота, etc.), policy (P: политика, правительство, закон, регулирование, президент, министерство, указ, постановление, etc.) and uncertainty (U: неопределённость, риск, кризис, нестабильность, угроза, волатильность, опасение, etc.). Articles containing all three groups () form the numerator, divided by the number of articles containing at least one group that month (). The ratio is standardized by its base-period standard deviation and rebased to a mean of 100, then aggregated using the four countries’ trade weights. See the full formulas in the index methodology.