The Bank of Israel's Composite State of the Economy Index for February 2018 increased by approximately 0.4 percent, slightly high compared with its growth in previous months and similar to its average rate of increase in 2017. The Index was positively impacted by an increase in imports of consumer goods and of manufacturing inputs in February and by an increase in Industrial Production in January. The decline in goods exports in February, the slight declines in services and retail trade revenue in January and the decrease in building starts in the final quarter of 2017 moderated the Index’s rate of growth. The Index’s readings for previous months were revised slightly downward (Table 1).  Table 2 presents the development of components of the Index in the past few months.

 

 

Table 1: Revisions in the Composite Index

Revision

Previous data

New data

February 2018

 

0.36

January 2018

0.28

0.23

December 2017

0.30

0.26

November 2017

0.32

0.30

 

 


Table 2: Changes in the Index components in recent months

(monthly percent change, unless otherwise noted)

 

February 2018

January 2018

December 2017

November 2017

Industrial Production Index (excluding mining and quarrying)

 

3.9

-0.1

2.1

Services Revenue Index (excluding education and public administration)

 

-0.3

-1.0

1.9

Retail Trade Revenue Index

 

-0.3

0.4

-0.2

Imports of consumer goods1

16.8

-6.8

1.6

5.7

Imports of manufacturing inputs (excluding fuels)1

18.3

-10.8

3.7

1.7

Goods exports (excluding agriculture) 1

-3.8

5.4

-1.4

1.0

Services exports (excluding transportation) 1

 

 

-5.4

4.6

Number of employee posts in the private sector

 

 

0.1

-0.1

Rate of vacant employee posts out of total number of employed people in the business sector2

3.8

3.8

3.8

3.9

Building starts3

 

 

-14.5

 

1 Foreign trade indices are quantitative (in contrast to CBS monthly foreign trade indices). Starting on January 14, 2018, import data produced by the CBS are based on a new system, therefore, the decline that appears in the table for January may not reflect economic factors, but rather technical recording factors.  The Composite Index model contains a component that deals with outlier observations.

2 The job vacancy rate is included in the Index at its level, seasonally adjusted and smoothed.

3 As the Central Bureau of Statistics ceased publishing monthly data on building starts, since July 2016 the calculation of the building starts component in the Composite Index has changed. The Component is calculated at a quarterly frequency and the change (in percent, seasonally adjusted) is attributed to the last month of the quarter for which it is published.

 

For additional data and explanations please click here.

http://www.boi.org.il/en/Research/Pages/ind.aspx

 

 

 

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