In today’s post by Riaan Grobler, we assess how positive the SA Budget Review was and compare it to previous Budget Reviews. The Finance Minister’s Confidence Index is based on the share of positive words (indicating improvement or success) used in the Budget Review relative to negative words (indicating loss or failure), while the Worry Ratio is the share of words indicating uncertainty. Both of these metrics of Budget Review sentiment were still indicative of negative sentiment / elevated uncertainty in the 2026 Budget Review, although they were down from their historical highs of 2022/23, respectively.
Sentiment analysis is notoriously sensitive to the words chosen to indicate positive or negative sentiment. In the second set of charts, we compare using a general lexicon based on word counts indicating general positive/negative sentiment, and one based on categories of words indicating sentiment, uncertainty or constraints. The difference between these two metrics could be interpreted as communications ‘spin’. The difference between these two metrics was higher this year, but down from levels in 2019 to 2022.
