​The Bank of Israel's Composite State of the Economy Index for July 2014 was unchanged. The deterioration in the development of the Index, relative to previous months—in which the Index increased by 0.1–0.2 percent per month—reflects part of the economic ramifications of the security situation. Components that made particular contributions to a decline in the Index this month were declines in services exports (due to a negative impact on incoming tourism), consumer goods imports, imports of manufacturing inputs, and building starts. An additional contribution to the decline in the Index was made by estimations that the trade and services revenue indices declined in July.[1] In contrast, an increase in goods exports contributed to an increase in the Index. There were no major updates to Index data for previous months (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
July
 
-0.02
June
0.10
0.11
May
0.19
0.15
April
0.11
0.08

 

 Table 2: Changes in the Index components in recent months
(monthly percent change, unless otherwise noted)

 

 
July
June
May
April
Industrial Production Index (excluding mining and quarrying)
 
-0.63
1.30
-0.52
Services Revenue Index (excluding finance, education, and public administration)
 
2.45
-2.10
-1.32
Trade Revenue Index
 
0.71
-1.18
1.75
Imports of consumer goods3
-2.27
-0.34
3.37
0.29
Imports of manufacturing inputs (excluding fuels)3
-1.21
-0.46
3.57
-2.29
Goods exports (excluding agriculture) 3
1.23
-3.37
4.40
-2.31
Services exports (excluding transportation) 3
-1.92
1.12
1.40
0.86
Number of employee posts in the private sector
 
 
-0.10
-0.03
Rate of vacant employee posts out of total number of employed people in the business sector1
2.69
2.68
2.70
2.68
Building starts2
 
 
-3.77
-1.53

 

1 The rate of job vacancies at its actual level, seasonally adjusted and smoothed.
2 Six-month moving average.
3 Foreign trade indices are quantitative (in contrast to CBS monthly foreign trade indices).
 
For additional data and explanations please click here:
http://www.boi.org.il/en/Research/Pages/ind.aspx
[1] Due to the lag in availability of some components of the composite index in the current month, additional sources of data—which are available before the Central Bureau of Statistics—are used, in order to fill in the latest observations which are unavailable. In particular, one month of missing observations of the revenue indices (trade and services) have been projected using an index based on Google searches, which is calculated in the Research Department. (Further information is available on the “detailed explanation” page on the website of the Composite State of the Economy Index.)