Constructing a financial fragility index for emerging countries

This article proposes a novel framework to construct a financial fragility index (FIX) of an emerging country from five main variables by combining the methods of principal component analysis and dynamic conditional correlations. The main contribution of the FIX is the time-varying weighting scheme of the variables and it is demonstrated for a leading emerging market, Turkey. A comparison with the classic principal component approach on forecasting economic activity-expectations and a policy making application are presented.