뉴스로 체감 경기 읽는다…한은, 새 ‘뉴스심리지수’ 공표

The Central Bank of Korea (CBK) has introduced a new "news sentiment index" (신NSI) that can more accurately capture the psychological aspects of the economy through economic news. The index, which is released daily based on data from the CBK's Economic Statistics System (ECOS), utilizes advanced language models to identify articles with a strong connection to domestic economic activities.

It then classifies the sentiment of the sentences found within those articles as positive, negative, or neutral, ultimately dividing the difference between positive and negative sentences by the total number of sentences to create a more refined metric. The new index, which has been in development since January 2022, is now published every Monday, with reports released at 4pm on non-holiday days.

Interpreting the index, a value higher than the base level of 100 indicates a more optimistic news sentiment, while a value below 100 suggests a more pessimistic outlook. The latest release for the end of August shows the index at 100.59, marking a slight increase from the previous value of 99.80, which had risen from 99.80 to 100.19 between August 26 and August 27.

The CBK cites several reasons for the development of this new index, including changes in consumption environments, an increase in the number of news articles and news sources, and the decreasing relevance of many articles to the current economy. Additionally, the existing index was found to lack up-to-date technological advancements and limitations in understanding the context of news articles.

To address these issues, the CBK added a step to prioritize and analyze the sentiment of articles with a strong connection to the Korean economy, while excluding advertisements, promotional content, and foreign news sources. The correlation coefficients between the new index and the existing consumer and business sentiment indices are 0.78 and 0.62, respectively, indicating an improvement over the previous versions (0.75 and 0.57).