A Cross-Country Analysis of Macroeconomic Responses to COVID-19 Pandemic Using Twitter Sentiments

COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the global economy. In this paper, we use Phillips curve to compare and analyze the macroeconomics of three different countries with distinct income levels, namely, lower-middle (Nigeria), upper-middle (South Africa), and high (Canada) income. We aim to (1) find macroeconomic changes of the three countries during the pandemic compared to pre-pandemic time, (2) compare the countries in terms of response to COVID-19 economic crisis, and (3) compare their expected economic reaction to COVID-19 pandemic in the near future. An advantage to our work is that we analyze macroeconomics on a monthly basis to capture the shocks and rapid changes caused by on and off rounds of lockdowns. We use the social sentiments of the Twitter data to approximate the macroeconomic statistics. The results show that in the near future, the main concern for all the countries is high inflation rate. Moreover, South Africa and Nigeria need to deal with high unemployment rates. Our work demonstrates that data from country-specific Twitter can be used to better understand concerns and sentiments around the macroeconomic situations at the local level. This can potentially lead to more targeted and publicly acceptable policies based on social media content