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

News provided by

Jun 10, 2013, 10:00 ET

NEW YORK, June 10, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- The Conference Board Employment Trends Index™ (ETI) increased slightly in May. The index now stands at 111.76, up from 111.11 (a downward revision) in April. The ETI figure for May is 3.0 percent higher than a year ago.

"While the increase in the Employment Trends Index (ETI) in May erased the small declines of the previous two months, overall, the growth in the ETI has remained weak," said Gad Levanon, Director of Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board. "Taken together with other recent indicators of economic activity, the ETI is suggesting that a significant improvement in employment growth is unlikely this summer."

May's improvement in the ETI was driven by positive contributions from seven of its eight components. The increasing indicators — from the largest positive contributor to the smallest — were Number of Temporary Employees, Job Openings, Percentage of Firms With Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now, Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales, Percentage of Respondents Who Say They Find "Jobs Hard to Get," Industrial Production, 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)**

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.

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE BOARD
The Conference Board is a global, independent business membership and research association working in the public interest. Our mission is unique: To provide the world's leading organizations with the practical knowledge they need to improve their performance and better serve society. The Conference Board is a non-advocacy, not-for-profit entity holding 501 (c) (3) tax-exempt status in the United States.
www.conference-board.org

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

Follow The Conference Board
Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

SOURCE The Conference Board