Gains Extend into the New Year
The Conference Board Employment Trends Index™ (ETI) increased in January. The index now stands at 127.86, up from 127.17 (a downward revision) in December. This represents a 7.6 percent gain in the ETI compared to a year ago.
"The Employment Trends Index suggests that strong job growth is likely to continue through the first half of the year," said Gad Levanon, Managing Director of Macroeconomic and Labor Market Research at The Conference Board. "As a result, wage growth will accelerate, thereby increasing pressure on profitability which is already suffering from low productivity growth and the strong dollar."
January's increase in the ETI was driven by positive contributions from six of the eight components. In order from the largest positive contributor to the smallest, these were: Percentage of Respondents Who Say They Find "Jobs Hard to Get," Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales, Industrial Production, Percentage of Firms With Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now, Job Openings, and Ratio of Involuntarily Part-time to All Part-time Workers.
The Employment Trends Index aggregates eight labor-market indicators, each of which has proven accurate in its own area. Aggregating individual indicators into a composite index filters out "noise" to show underlying trends more clearly.
The eight labor-market indicators aggregated into the Employment Trends Index include:
Percentage of Respondents Who Say They Find "Jobs Hard to Get" (The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Survey®)
Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance (U.S. Department of Labor)
Percentage of Firms With Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now (© National Federation of Independent Business Research Foundation)
Number of Employees Hired by the Temporary-Help Industry (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)
Ratio of Involuntarily Part-time to All Part-time Workers (BLS)
Job Openings (BLS)**
Industrial Production (Federal Reserve Board)*
Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis)**
*Statistical imputation for the recent month
**Statistical imputation for two most recent months
