The Warflation Index retrieves daily measures of global media attention to “war” and “inflation”, calculates their 7-day moving average, and aggregates them with equal weights. It draws inspiration from Arthur Okun’s “Economic Discomfort Index” (later renamed as the “Misery Index“), and it leverages the power of Big Data. Primary data is sourced from Google’s GDELT 2.0 public database. The index is valued at 100 on February 23, 2022, a day before the start of the Ukraine war.

If you have any additional questions, please contact us.

Credit: Alexandre Kateb, The Multipolarity Report, 2024.

Disclaimer

The Warflation index is still in development. It could still be subject to retrospective adjustments, even though we will keep the ‘vintage’ version as a benchmark and continue to update it, as long as the primary data can be accessed. Full methodology, benchmarking with related indicators, robustness checks, and derived insights will be released in a working paper published in due course.