Northern insights : Geopolitical risk from Finnish news media

Abstract

We construct a geopolitical risk indicator for Finland using local, Finnish language news media - FinnGPR. We compare FinnGPR to global and country-specific measures of geopolitical risk derived from Anglo-Saxon media. We show that in the case of Finland, local geopolitical risk perceptions based on local news media differ from global attention on geopolitical risk in Finland as reflected in the global media. We study the effects of FinnGPR on the Finnish economy and find that the Finnish economy tends to be resilient to geopolitical risk shocks. Nevertheless, we find that geopolitical risks can represent a threat to Finnish financial market stability.