Bank of Korea Launches New News Sentiment Index to Track Economic Mood

The Bank of Korea has unveiled a new gauge designed to read the economy through the tone of news coverage, describing it as a more precise measure of public economic sentiment.

The revised News Sentiment Index, or new NSI, will be published weekly through the bank’s Economic Statistics System. At the end of August, it stood at 100.59, above the benchmark of 100. The index rose from 99.80 on Aug. 26 to 100.19 the following day and remained above the benchmark.

The bank developed the original index in January 2022 and began publishing it weekly the following month. It measures the difference between positive and negative sentences in economically relevant news, divided by the total number of positive, negative and neutral sentences. A reading above 100 indicates that news sentiment is more optimistic than the average recorded from 2005 to 2025, while a reading below 100 indicates a more pessimistic mood.

The revision adds a screening stage to identify articles strongly connected to actual domestic economic activity. It then analyzes sentiment in those articles while excluding advertising and promotional content and some foreign news. The bank said this approach addresses changes in news consumption, the growth in the number of media outlets and articles, and the limits of older language technology in understanding context.

The revised index recorded correlation coefficients of 0.78 with the Consumer Sentiment Index and 0.62 with the Business Sentiment Index. Those figures compare with 0.75 and 0.57, respectively, for the previous version.

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The process was improved by adding a stage to select articles strongly related to our economy before sentiment analysis.