Our South African Economic Policy Uncertainty Index developed by Jacques Quass De Vos shows that policy uncertainty is below its historical trend at present. The correlation between our index and other measures for South Africa is very low, suggesting that they are not capturing the same underlying concepts. Our measure is based on Baker, Bloom and David 2016 but we have not normalised the measure plotted in today’s chart. As an aside, we have shown that our fiscal and monetary policy uncertainty measures correlate with other measures of fiscal and monetary policy uncertainty, and that inflation attention correlates with inflation and survey-based inflation expectations.
One reason that other uncertainty indicators, such as those of the NWU Business School Policy Uncertainty or World Uncertainty Index, have been increasing since 2025 is likely that these indices have been normalised differently.
