Anti-pandemic restrictions, uncertainty and sentiment in seven countries

Abstract

We investigate how the stringency of government anti-pandemic policy measures might affect economic policy uncertainty in countries with different degrees of press freedom, various press reporting styles and writing conventions. We apply a text-based measure of uncertainty using data from over 400,000 press articles from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, the UK and the USA published before the wide-scale vaccination programmes were introduced. The measure accounts for pandemic-related words and negative sentiment scores weight the selected articles. We then tested the dynamic panel data model where the relative changes in these measures were explained by levels and changes in the stringency measures. We have found that introducing and then maintaining unchanged for a relatively long time a constant level of anti-pandemic stringency measures reduce uncertainty. In contrast, a change in such a level has the opposite effect. This result is robust across the countries, despite their differences in political systems, press control and freedom of speech.