Business Export Orientation Detection through Web Content Analysis

Economic indicators are essential for economic studies, forecasts and economic policy designs. To meet their objective, they should be available in a frequent and timely fashion. However, official data are usually released with a long delay. Web-based economic indicators can be made available on real-time basis, thus contributing to alleviate this lag. Across all the economic indicators, those related to the export orientation of the companies are particularly interesting because of the growing importance of international trade to most developed countries.

This paper proposes a prediction system that analyzes corporate websites to produce web-based economic indicators for the export orientation of the companies. To validate our approach, we compared the prediction accuracy of our model to a baseline model made by manually retrieving the web indicators from 350 corporate websites. Our results showed that the proposed prediction system captures most of the prediction accuracy of the model with manual web indicators, but achieved at a minimum processing cost.