From Twitter to GDP: Estimating Economic Activity From Social Media

This paper shows how the use of data derived from Twitter can be used as a proxy for measuring GDP at the country level. Using a dataset of 270 million geo-located image tweets shared on Twitter in 2012 and 2013, I find that: (i) Twitter data can be used as a proxy for estimating GDP at the country level and can explain 94 percent of the variation in GDP; and (ii) that the residuals from my preferred model are negatively correlated to a data quality index which assesses the capacity of a country's statistical system. This suggests that my estimates for GDP are more accurate for countries which are considered to have more reliable GDP data. Taken together, these findings show that institutions and individuals could use social media data to corroborate official GDP estimates; or alternatively for government statistic agencies to incorporate social media data to complement and further reduce measurement errors. Keywords: National Accounts, Big Data.