EXPLORING ON-LINE SOCIETAL RISK PERCEPTION FOR HARMONIOUS SOCIETY MEASUREMENT

The nearly 30-year economic growth miracle brings the consequent tremendous poor-rich gap leading strong drives for social transformation in current China. Chinese top leaders have realized to increase the peoples＇ income, improve quality of life and construct a ＂harmonious society＂ as key missions especially in recent 10 years. How to measure a harmonious society is one important topic as different measures may lead to different development policies. This paper outlines over 10 indices relevant to measure a harmonious society. Some are global indicators, while some are contributed by domestic researchers and arouse debates. Most of those indicators require conducting surveys on social attitudes under micro levels, which is always time consuming with problem of data quality. As Internet technology advances provide ways to record and disseminate fresh community ideas and thoughts conveniently, detecting topics or emotions from on-line public opinions is becoming a trend or one supplement way to overcome those data acquisition problems. This paper discusses one approach to on-line societal risk perception using hot search words and BBS posts. Such a trial aims to provide another way to societal risk perception different from those in traditional socio psychology studies. Challenges are also indicated.

A CAUSALITY ANALYSIS OF SOCIETAL RISK PERCEPTION AND STOCK MARKET VOLATILITY IN CHINA

Modem China is undergoing a variety of social conflicts as the arrival of new era with thetransformation of the principal contradiction. Then monitoring the society stable is a huge workload.Online societal risk perception is acquired by mapping on-line public concerns respectively intosocietal risk events including national security, economy ＆ finance, public morals, daily life, socialstability, government management, and resources ＆ environment, and then provides one kind ofmeasurement toward the society state. Obviously, stable and harmonious social situations are the basicguarantee for the healthy development of the stock market. Thus we concern whether the variations ofthe societal risk are related to stock market volatility. We study their relationships by two steps, firstthe relationships between search trends and societal risk perception; next the relationships betweensocietal risk perception and stock volatility. The weekend and holiday effects in China stock market aretaken into consideration. Three different econometric methods are explored to observe the impacts ofvariations of societal risk on Shanghai Composite Index and Shenzhen Composite Index. 3 majorfindings are addressed. Firstly, there exist causal relations between Baidu Index and societal riskperception. Secondly, the perception of finance ＆ economy, social stability, and governmentmanagement has distinguishing effects on the volatility of both Shanghai Composite Index and Shenzhen Composite Index. Thirdly, the weekend and holiday effects of societal risk perception on the stock market are verified. The research demonstrates that capturing societal risk based on on-line public concerns is feasible and meaningful.