Measure country-level socio-economic indicators with streaming news: An empirical study

Abstract

Socio-economic conditions are difficult to measure. For example, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics needs to conduct large-scale household surveys regularly to track the unemployment rate, an indicator widely used by economists and policy makers. We argue that events reported in streaming news can be used as “micro-sensors” for measuring socio-economic conditions. Similar to collecting surveys and then counting answers, it is possible to measure a socio-economic indicator by counting related events. In this paper, we propose Event-Centric Indicator Measure (ECIM), a novel approach to measure socioeconomic indicators with events. We empirically demonstrate strong correlations between ECIM values to several representative indicators in socio-economic research.