The evolving impact of global, region-specific and country-specific uncertainty*

We develop a dynamic factor model with time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility, estimate it using a large panel of macroeconomic and financial data for 22 countries and decompose the variance of each variable in terms of contributions from uncertainty common to all countries (‘global uncertainty’), region-specific uncertainty and country-specific uncertainty. Among other findings, the estimates suggest that global uncertainty plays a primary role in explaining the volatility of inflation, interest rates and stock prices, although to a varying extent over time, while all uncertainty components are found to play a non-negligible role for real economic activity, credit and money for most countries.