The Relationship Between Sentiments of Social Media and Economic Indicators

Gross National Happiness (GNH) has been a popular issue since King of Bhutan, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck declared in 1972, ‘Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross Domestic Product.’ Since then, GNH is discussed by multiple researchers. Their researches are to determine its accuracy and the representative. Many Countries have announced taking this indicator to be one of the national performance review indexes. In year 2013, Taiwan has considered GNH as one of the performance review indexes. Among 2013 to 2018, Taiwan’s Happiness scores have been rising. Taiwan is now the happiest country in Asia. Nonetheless, there’s no research shows that it can actually represent Taiwanese happiness emotion. In order to testify this issue, we took 3600 articles from one of Taiwan most used social media-Gossiping board of PPT, to identify Taiwanese emotion among 2015 to 2017. We used Sentiment Analysis to calculate the monthly sentiment score of the media. In the end, we found that Taiwanese Sentiment scores among social media are rising as well as GNH scores. We used regression analysis to find out which one of GDP growth rate, GNI growth rate, are having significantly positive correlation with social media’s sentiment scores. We can then use our conclusion to determine that social media’s sentiment score can probably be one of the leading indicators of Economic indexes.