Scottish Business Sentiment Index

Footnotes

1. Articles were retrieved from Factiva on October 12, 2024.

2. For more details and relevant references about the LDA model, see Section 2.3 in Chung et al. (2022) or the most up to date version of the working paper provided by the authors.

3. Please see a list of topics with results for 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, and 80 topics.

4. The words identified for topic 24 are: “time people dont make year back thing big long im problem world bit work point money life put find fac”. See Appendix for the words identified in all other topics.

5. For both the 50 topics and the 20 aggregated topics the topic coverage allocations appear to be rather stable with only small differences over the years (see Figure A.1 and A.2 in the Appendix).

6. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, data was not collected in the last two weeks of March 2020 and in April 2020 and May 2020. Find more information about the data and methodology at the Scottish Consumer Sentiment Indicator - 2024 Quarter 3 (Scottish Government).

7. The quarterly series for the Scottish Nominal GDP in £ billion, current prices and seasonally adjusted can be found at the Scotland's Economic and Fiscal Forecasts (Scottish Fiscal Commission).

8. To better highlight the changes in those two indices, Figure A.3 in the Appendix plots the quarterly series of the percentage point (ppt.) changes from the previous quarter in the overall Scottish BSI and that of GDP growth. Overall, similar patterns arise as in the previous figure.

9. The quarterly series for the Scottish 16+ Employees in employment level (millions of individuals) can be found at the Scotland's Economic and Fiscal Forecasts (Scottish Fiscal Commission).

10. The monthly series for the Scottish and UK Economic Policy Uncertainty Index (EUI - right axis), which is standardized with a mean of 100 between March 2008 and 2010 can be found at the Scotland's Economic and Fiscal Forecasts (Scottish Fiscal Commission).

11. This includes a variety of uncertainty indicators, such as: Global Economic Policy, Trade Policy, Twitter Economic, Energy-Related and Oil Price, among others, available at the Economic Policy Uncertainty Platform.