The Conference Board's Employment Trends Index (ETI) gained to 116.39 in February from a downwardly revised 115.99 in January, and is up 4.4% from a year ago, the group announced Monday.
The January number was originally reported as 116.61.
"February's job report and the ongoing improvement in the Employment Trends Index should provide some relief for those concerned about weakness in the U.S. economy and labor market," said Gad Levanon, Associate Director, Macroeconomic Research at The Conference Board. "The majority of the ETI's components have been steadily rising in recent months, suggesting solid job growth will continue in the coming months."
The gain in ETI was driven by positive contributions from six of its eight components. The increasing indicators - from the largest positive contributor to the smallest - were number of temporary employees, job openings, real manufacturing and trade sales, industrial production, consumer confidence survey percentage of respondents who say they find "jobs hard to get," and ratio of involuntarily part-time to all part-time workers, 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).
