The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) gained to 113.54 in August from an upwardly revised 112.80 in July, and is up 4.5% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
"The growth of the Employment Trends Index (ETI) in recent months suggests that employment is likely to moderately expand through the fall," said Gad Levanon, Associate Director, Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board. "The rapid job growth in the first half of 2013 was faster than we had expected given weak economic activity and only moderate improvement in the ETI. The slowing down of employment in the past two months brings the six-month trend to a more sustainable rate."
The gain in ETI was driven by positive contributions from seven of its eight components. The increasing indicators — from the largest positive contributor to the smallest — were ratio of involuntarily part-time to all part-time workers, consumer confidence survey percentage of respondents who say they find "jobs hard to get," initial claims for unemployment insurance, real manufacturing and trade sales, industrial production, job openings, and number of temporary employees, according to the Conference Board.
The ETI aggregates eight labor-market indicators, each of which has proven accurate in its own area. Aggregating individual indicators into a composite index filters out so-called "noise" to show underlying trends more clearly.
The eight labor-market indicators aggregated into the ETI 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); Part-time Workers for Economic Reasons (BLS); Job Openings (BLS); Industrial Production (Federal Reserve Board); and Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis).
