The Conference Board Employment Trends Index™ (ETI) Increased in August

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Sep 10, 2012, 10:00 ET

NEW YORK, Sept. 10, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The Conference Board Employment Trends Index™ (ETI) improved slightly in August for the second month. The index now stands at 108.59, up from the revised figure of 108.04 in July. The August figure is 6.2 percent higher than a year ago.

"Despite this month's rise, the Employment Trends Index has barely increased since February, suggesting that slow job growth will continue in the short-term," said Gad Levanon, Director of Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board. "Economic activity expanded by less than a 2 percent rate in recent months, and this pace is likely to continue through the end of the year. In such an environment, it's difficult to foresee the economy adding much more than 100,000 jobs per month."

August's increase in the ETI was driven by positive contributions from four of the eight components. The improving indicators – beginning with the largest positive contributor – were Percentage of Firms With Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now, Ratio of Involuntarily Part-time to All Part-time Workers, Job Openings and Percentage of Respondents Who Say They Find "Jobs Hard to Get."

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)**

The Conference Board publishes the Employment Trends Index monthly, at 10 a.m. ET on the Monday that follows each Friday release of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation report. The technical notes to this series are available on The Conference Board website: http://www.conference-board.org/data/eti.cfm.

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www.conference-board.org

*Statistical imputation for the recent month
**Statistical imputation for two most recent months

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SOURCE The Conference Board