Brazil Economic Policy Uncertainty

Graphing EPU

In this post, I will show how to create a graph about the Brazilian Economic Policy Uncertainty index. For more information about this index, click here. Shortly, it is an index that calculates economic policy uncertainty by searching for specific words in Brazilian newspapers.

Let’s download the data and create a graph to see what happens.

library(readxl)
library(httr)
library(zoo)
url1<-'https://www.policyuncertainty.com/media/Brazil_Policy_Uncertainty_Data.xlsx'
GET(url1, write_disk(tf <- tempfile(fileext = ".xlsx")))

Response [https://www.policyuncertainty.com/media/Brazil_Policy_Uncertainty_Data.xlsx]
  Date: 2023-03-16 20:58
  Status: 200
  Content-Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet
  Size: 11.9 kB
<ON DISK>  C:\Users\hcmrt\AppData\Local\Temp\RtmpuWiLrJ\file24dc1dc71136.xlsx

data <- read_excel(tf)
colnames(data) <- c("Year", "Month", "EPU")
data<- data[1:nrow(data)-1,]
data$date <- as.yearmon(paste(data$Year, data$Month), "%Y %m")

data <-subset(data, Year >= 2010)

Finally, let’s create a graph:

library(ggplot2)
library(ggthemes)
ggplot(data= data, aes(x=date, y =EPU ) ) + geom_line() + theme_solarized() +
  labs(title = "Brazil Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) (since 2010)",
       caption = "Source: https://www.policyuncertainty.com/") 

Well, it seems that we do not have too much uncertainty at the moment. At least not the type of uncertainty that this index measures. Still, this is a nice index to learn more about.

Thanks for stopping by!