My colleague Tom Flaye recently introduced me to the Recession index, an index developed by The Economist that tracks the mentions of the word ‘Recession’ in New York Times and Washington post.
It inspired me to take a look at the UK economy in InfluenceMonitor and it came up with an interesting graph.
The graph below shows the share of online articles and blog posts (not just the newspapers used in the original R-index) that mention the word ‘recession’ when they also mention the UK economy.
The blue line is where all articles and blog posts are weighted equal and the red line is where they are adjusted for their measured influence in the debate on the UK economy.
The green line (Gap) shows the percentage difference between the 2 lines.
Although the direction of both the blue and the red line would (according to the R-Index) indicate that the UK Economy is not on its way to a recession the sharp increase of the gap (green line) indicates that those with more influence in the debate on the UK economy have substantially increased their mentions of the R-word compared with other (and less influential) commentators.
