Which news topics drive economic prosperity in China?

by Wanbo Lu, Yifu Wang, Xingjian Zhang

Precise and real-time measurements of economic prosperity are vital to a country’s economic system. This study aims to identify news topics that promoted economic prosperity in China from 2011–2021. By extracting economic topics from news text data, we construct a news coincidence index with comprehensive information and strong timeliness and reveal the trend of topic contribution. The Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model is applied to extract economic topics from the news. We use a mixed-frequency dynamic factor model to track rapid economic development without using high-frequency weekly and daily data. We identify the six most influential topics and investigate their evolution, which may serve as a reference for economic construction and regulation.