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| Policy Communication, Public Attention and Economic Uncertainty: Index Construction and Empirical Research Based on Text Big Data |
| ZHANG Tongbin, LI Yuan, WANG Lei
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School of Economics, Dongbei University of Finance and Economics;
School of Mathematics and Information Science, Shandong Technology and Business University |
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Abstract The complicated economic situation at home and abroad has led to a significant increase in China's economic uncertainty, and maintaining stability while pursuing progress has become the general tone of economic development in China. In this context, studying the impact of monetary policy communication and fiscal policy communication on economic uncertainty is of great practical significance for improving the effectiveness of policy implementation and ensuring the smooth operation of the macroeconomy. In this paper, we empirically examine the impact and mechanism of policy communication on economic uncertainty at three specific time points: the international financial crisis, the European sovereign debt crisis, and the Sino-US trade friction using the TVP-VAR model. The main conclusions are as follows.
Policy communication can significantly reduce economic uncertainty during the international financial crisis, the European sovereign debt crisis, and the Sino-US trade friction. Policy communication can provide the public with an “information advantage”, which is conducive to enhancing the public's acceptance of policy information and guiding public behavior to converge towards policy objectives. In addition, the economic stabilization effect of policy communication is remarkably sustainable. We re-examine the impact of policy communication on economic uncertainty at different time points by changing the calculation method of economic uncertainty and replacing the construction method of the policy communication index, and verify the robustness of the benchmark estimation results.
The results of the mechanism test show that, regarding the policy tools implementation mechanism, the impact of expansionary monetary policy communication leads to an increase in money supply and a decrease in the benchmark interest rate, and active fiscal policy communication sends a policy signal of expanded government spending and reduction of tax burdens. Therefore, policy communication uses the way of strengthening the implementation effects of policy tools to form an effective macroeconomic adjustment. For the public policy attention mechanism, the impact of policy communication on public policy attention is significantly positive, indicating that policy communication can strengthen the public's attention to economic policies and promote the adjustment of public policy expectations in the direction of policy objectives, so as to achieve the unity of policy objectives and economic operation directions.
Compared to the existing research, the possible contributions of this paper are that, first, we discuss the mechanism of policy communication on economic uncertainty from the perspective of expectation adjustment, and form a logical chain of “policy communication to expectation adjustment to economic stability”, which provides empirical evidence for optimizing policy communication and strengthening expectation management. Second, supervised machine learning methods are used to quantify both policy communication and expectation guidance. Specifically, the TF-IDF method is used for text vectorization, Word2Vec for keyword expansion, and support vector machines for text classification, effectively enabling accurate extraction of policy text information. Third, we use a supervised machine learning method to measure the fiscal policy communication index, to achieve the accurate measurement of fiscal policy communication of the Ministry of Finance, which has important reference value for improving the accuracy and effectiveness of fiscal policy.
Based on our findings, the government should pay attention to both the direct adjustment function of policy communication and the role of expectation guidance, and further improve the mechanism of policy communication. In addition, the government should also focus on strengthening the synergistic effect of policy mixes on macroeconomic operations and implement differentiated communication strategies for different policy instruments. Following a holistic and systematic approach, the government should optimize the coordination mechanism of policy communication from different departments which is significant to form economic expectations and achieve stable growth goals.
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Received: 29 April 2024
Published: 01 August 2025
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