Team members: Huaiyu Chen, Botao Jiang, Meiqi Liu, Leqi Mei, Moiketsi Thipe, Xiewen Wu, Sihan Zhang, Yang Zhou, and Erik Krumins
Project mentors: Drs. Chris Chao Su and Lei Guo
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Abstract
Sovereign debt refers to a central government’s debt. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing debt challenges in many countries. As of now, about half of low-income countries and several emerging markets are already in or at high risk of a debt crisis. In light of the urgency of the issue, people from many different countries have been using Twitter — a social media platform — to distribute relevant news and information and share their thoughts on the topic. Tracking the Twitter conversation about sovereign debt would be useful for policymakers, economists, and other individuals and organizations to better understand the issue and offer effective policy advice. This project aims to (1) examine the Twitter discourse related to the sovereign debt issue and (2) identify opinion leaders in this conversation.
Computational text analysis and manual content analysis were conducted to examine tweets mentioning sovereign debt collected from January 2020 to March 2021. The analysis focused on the mentions of countries and themes prominent in the tweets. In addition, network analysis was used to identify opinion leaders. The results show that larger countries in terms of population and geographic size were mentioned more often than other countries. The study also reveals that individual users such as economic experts and ordinary citizens were more influential than institutional users in leading the conversation on Twitter. Findings of the study contribute to the literature of international information flow and have practical implications for understanding Twitter as an international public sphere for discussing important economic issues.
Keywords
sovereign debt; Twitter; Covid-19; international information flow; opinion leaders; network analysis; content analysis; computational analysis
Client Bio
Dr. Marialuz Moreno Badia is the Deputy Division Chief in the International Monetary Fund’s Fiscal Affairs Department where she coordinates work on the Fiscal Monitor, a report developed to survey and analyze global public finance developments and assess financial policies. Dr. Badia’s research has focused on fiscal institutions, debt sustainability, and fiscal-financial interlinkages. Her country work experience includes a broad range of advanced and emerging countries such as Brazil, Greece, Ireland, and Spain. Dr. Badia holds a Ph.D. from Boston University.
Team Bio
Our group includes nine master’s students in the Emerging Media Studies program at Boston University, mentored by the instructors Dr. Su and Dr. Guo. Our collective experience spans across a number of disciplines that each informs the topic of sovereign debt and how it is discussed in online social contexts. Our group members consist of those who have practical experiences in data analysis, economics, and sociology. As a team, we analyze and interpret the Twitter conversation through data collection, text analysis, network analysis, and report writing.