Economic analysis through alternative data and big data techniques: what do they tell about Brazil?

Matheus Pereira Libório; Petr Iakovlevitch Ekel; Carlos Augusto Paiva da Silva Martins

doi:10.1007/s43546-022-00387-z

Economic analysis through alternative data and big data techniques: what do they tell about Brazil?

SN Bus Econ. 2023;3(1):3. doi: 10.1007/s43546-022-00387-z. Epub 2022 Dec 5.

Authors

Matheus Pereira Libório¹, Petr Iakovlevitch Ekel^{1

2}, Carlos Augusto Paiva da Silva Martins¹

Affiliations

¹ Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, 30535-012 Brazil.
² Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, 31270-901 Brazil.

Abstract

Alternative data are now widely used in economic analyses worldwide but still infrequent in studies on the Brazilian economy. This research demonstrates how alternative data extracted from Google Trends and Google Mobility contribute to innovative economic analysis. First, it demonstrates that the search for the future on the internet is correlated (R = 0.62) with the average household income in Brazilian states. The three Brazilian states with the most people looking for the future on the internet have an average household income 1.6 times higher than people from states that do not have this behavior. The search for the future represents 10.9% of the economic development potential of the states, while the proportion of people with university degrees, scientific publications, and researchers represents another 60.4%. The reduction in mobility in retail/recreation locations averaged 34.28% in Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Uruguay. This group of countries had COVID-19 infection and death rates 1.25 and 1.74 times higher than in countries that reduced their mobility in retail/recreation locations by 45.03%. The impact of reduced mobility in retail/recreation locations on the unemployment rate, gross domestic product degrowth, and inflation in countries such as Brazil was 1.1, 2.2, and 2.6 times lower than in countries that reduced mobility more of people. The research contributions are associated with identifying new indicators extracted from alternative data and their application to carry out innovative economic analyses.

Keywords: Alternative data; Big data; Economic analysis; Google Mobility; Google Trends.

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.