NEW YORK – The Conference Board’s Employment Trends Index (ETI) ended the year on a high note, rising to 99.0 in December from a downwardly revised 98.5 in November, originally reported as 99.0, and is up 7.6% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
"The improvement in the Employment Trends Index in recent months suggests employment growth is likely to accelerate moderately in the first half of 2011," said Gad Levanon, Associate Director, Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board. "While this is a welcome improvement, we don’t expect employment to grow fast enough for the unemployment rate to dip below 9 percent for the rest of the year."
December’s increase in the ETI, was driven by positive contributions from five out of the eight components. The improving indicators included Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance, Percentage of Firms With Positions Not Able to Fill Right Now, Number of Temporary Employees, Industrial Production and Real Manufacturing and Trade Sales.
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).
