Japan to Develop New Economic Index Based on Online Texts

Tokyo, Aug. 20 (Jiji Press)--The Japanese economy ministry plans to develop a new indicator that can be released swiftly by capitalizing on texts posted on social networking websites such as Twitter, informed sources told Jiji Press on Thursday. The ministry will collect data from operators of such websites and extract words characteristically used in economic upturns and downturns, while paying due consideration to the protection of private information, the sources said. The ministry plans to make a budget request for the development so it can start announcing the online texts-based economic index in fiscal 2016 beginning in April, they said, adding the index will be released as quickly as within a few days after a data-collection period of some one week. Existing economic indicators cannot be announced promptly because data compilation is time-consuming. For instance, industrial output, inventory and shipment indexes for a month are released at the end of the next month. END