Preliminary results and prospects
This technical report shows our ongoing work aimed at monitoring societal issues and economic activities (e.g., industrial production, unemployment, loneliness, cultural participation) across EU member states by mining unconventional data sources to complement official statistics. While the latter are often released at a relatively low frequency (e.g., monthly, quarterly or yearly), unconventional data sources are available at very high frequencies, enabling policymakers to grasp sudden changes in the economy and society, and to timely design adaptive policy interventions with the potential of fostering economic growth and societal well-being.
Considered unconventional data sources include the Global Dataset of Events, Language and Tone (GDELT), Google Search data, and Dow Jones Data, News and Analytics (DNA). We discuss the potential of these data sets, detailing the steps needed to properly handle, process, and extract useful information from each of them. We also describe the Business Intelligence (BI) dashboards produced to interact and visualize the signals drawn from the data, which have been also publically released within both the Joint Research Centre Data Catalogue and the European Data portal. Finally, we show an early experiment aiming at nowcasting unemployment in Germany, Spain, France, and Italy, demonstrating the added value of these unconventional data to proxy social and economic activities for the benefit of both scholars and policymakers.
BARBAGLIA Luca;
COLAGROSSI Marco;
CONSOLI Sergio;
PANELLA Francesco;
2023-03-17
Publications Office of the European Union
JRC130780
978-92-68-00435-7 (online),
1831-9424 (online),
EUR 31444 EN,
OP KJ-NA-31-444-EN-N (online),
https://doi.org/10.2760/012015,
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC130780,
10.2760/012015 (online),
