Decoding Economic Insights: The Analytical Power of News Content

In this article, we explore the potential of textual data as an alternative source for economic analysis. We employ a range of data extraction and labeling techniques, including domain expert, rule-based approaches and pre-trained language models to determine the polarity of textual data. By compiling a corpus of Spanish news articles from Mexico spanning 2006 to 2023 and comparing our sentiment index with economic data from official agencies, we demonstrate that news articles can serve a reliable source for economic analysis.