The Bank of Israel's Composite State of the Economy Index increased by 0.3 percent in July 2015, similar to its average rate of growth in recent months. The Composite Index for July was positively influenced by increases in goods exports and in services exports in July, and by June’s increase in industrial production and in trade revenue and in services revenue. In contrast, the decline in consumer goods imports and the decline in the job vacancy rate moderated the increase of the index. A decline in business sector product[1] in the second quarter led to a slight downward revision of the index’s growth in 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 |
0.29 | |
June |
0.41 |
0.40 |
May |
0.30 |
0.23 |
April |
0.21 |
0.13 |
Table 2: Changes in the Index components in recent months
(monthly percent change, unless otherwise noted)
July 2015 |
June 2015 |
May 2015 |
April 2015 | |
Industrial Production Index (excluding mining and quarrying) |
3.7 |
-1.2 |
-4.4 | |
Services Revenue Index (excluding finance, education, and public administration) |
2.0 |
-1.4 |
2.0 | |
Trade Revenue Index |
0.9 |
0.9 |
-0.6 | |
Imports of consumer goods3 |
-0.9 |
3.6 |
1.2 |
-4.9 |
Imports of manufacturing inputs (excluding fuels)3 |
-0.4 |
7.0 |
-4.2 |
-1.9 |
Goods exports (excluding agriculture) 3 |
3.4 |
-3.1 |
2.5 |
-4.6 |
Services exports (excluding transportation) 3 |
2.3 |
0.9 |
5.2 |
-3.8 |
Number of employee posts in the private sector |
0.0 |
-0.1 | ||
Rate of vacant employee posts out of total number of employed people in the business sector1 |
3.20 |
3.34 |
3.13 |
2.86 |
Building starts2 |
0.7 |
3.3 |
1 The rate of job vacancies at its actual level, seasonally adjusted.
2 Six-month moving average.
3 Foreign trade indices are quantitative (in contrast to CBS monthly foreign trade indices).
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[1] Quarterly business sector product data, which are not available at the time of publication of the monthly Composite State of the Economy Index, are included in it with a lag, such that the increase of the index reflects the monthly growth of business sector product over time.