Tracking real-time economic developments globally is a cumbersome task. In order to make it a little easier (and to experiment with the rvest web scraping package), I’ve put together some code that scrapes news headlines and summaries from Google News and plots the frequency of the occurrence of certain terms. For instance, the following map visualises the extent that global isolation is featured in recent news articles. The colour scale represents the percentage of articles which contain keywords related to economic isolation (e.g. sanctions, tariffs etc.). Unsurprisingly given recent events, Russia, Iran, China and the U.S. score highly. However, similar issues appear to dominate recent news relating to various other economies: