Impact of 2023 Turkey Earthquake Price Hikes: Insightful Socio-Economic Analysis Using Transformer Models and Explainable AI

Natural disasters cause economic instability, leading to severe financial hardships for affected communities. The rapid surge in essential goods prices during such events significantly burdens vulnerable populations, highlighting the critical need for timely policy interventions. While understanding public sentiment on economic distress is crucial for effective data-driven policy generation, research specifically analyzing public sentiment on price hikes in such contexts remains limited, often due to a lack of dedicated datasets. To address this, this paper first introduces a novel dataset of social media comments on price hikes related to the 2023 Turkey earthquake. Second, to support data-driven policy-making by quantifying public sentiment, we applied a range of AI models and identified transformer-based models like DistilBERT as particularly effective for sentiment classification. Furthermore, we employ Explainable AI techniques to enhance model trust, enabling policymakers to confidently use these insights to support disaster recovery and economic stabilization in affected regions.