Social Mood on Economy Index

A daily measure of the Italian sentiment on the economy based on X data

Istat updates the Social Mood on Economy Index, a new experimental index first released in October 2018. The index provides daily measures of the Italian sentiment on the economy. These measures are derived from samples of Italian public posts captured in real time.

The production procedure of the index collects and processes posts containing at least one word belonging to a specific set of filter keywords, which has been designed by subject-matter experts. On average, this procedure elaborates through sentiment analysis techniques about 26,000 posts per day.
The daily time series of the index is available in the download section from the period 10th February 2016.

Due to the recent advances in sentiment analysis methods and to the experimental nature of the index, the data processing procedure has been partially revised and the time series has been recalculated on the occasion of the release of the fourth quarter of 2021.
A dedicated paragraph of the methodological note available in the download section describes the main innovations introduced and the main differences with the previous release.

With the release of the data for the first quarter of 2022, a focus on the Social Mood on Economy Index for the period February 20-March 20 was released to analyze the impact of the Ukrainian invasion on the index.

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This interactive plot shows the daily time series of the Social Mood on Economy Index (green line), along with the corresponding 7-days (blue line) and 30-days (red line) moving averages. The higher the value of the index, the better is the sentiment of the day.
The significant peaks and valleys of the daily index have been annotated and are highlighted with a small square. The dominating topics emerging from the posts of the day are displayed by positioning the mouse on the peak (when several topics are listed, they are sorted by decreasing frequency).

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This interactive plot shows the daily trend component of the Social Mood on Economy Index. The adopted seasonal adjustment methodology is described in a dedicated paragraph of the methodological note available in the download section.

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This interactive plot shows the time evolution of the number of posts that have been collected and analyzed to compute the daily index. Discontinuities in the time series correspond either to downtime periods of the data collection system, or to the deletion of anomalous data generated by off-topic viral posts (for details, please refer to the daily time series available in the download section).
The significant peaks of the daily volume are highlighted with a small square. The dominating topic emerging from the posts of the day are displayed by positioning the mouse on the peak.