The Bank of Israel's Composite State of the Economy Index for May 2016 increased by 0.1 percent. Since the beginning of the year, the rate of growth of the index is lower than its rate of increase in 2015. The import of consumer goods and the import of inputs contributed to the increase in the index. In contrast, the index was negatively impacted by a decline in goods exports in May, and by a decline in the industrial production index and the revenue index in April.
A revision of the weights attributed to each component of the index led to a decline in the weight of the job vacancy rate, and to a downward revision of the index from the beginning of 2015 until recent months. Table 1 shows the revisions in the growth rate of the Index in previous months. 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 |
May |
0.13 | |
April |
0.14 |
0.05 |
March |
0.20 |
0.10 |
February |
0.14 |
0.01 |
Table 2: Changes in the Index components in recent months
(monthly percent change, unless otherwise noted)
May 2016 |
April 2016 |
March 2016 |
February 2016 | |
Industrial Production Index (excluding mining and quarrying) |
-1.7 |
3.4 |
-0.7 | |
Services Revenue Index (excluding education, and public administration) |
-2.9 |
2.8 |
-1.5 | |
Retail Trade Revenue Index |
-3.5 |
5.7 |
-0.2 | |
Imports of consumer goods1 |
5.9 |
1.8 |
1.2 |
0.2 |
Imports of manufacturing inputs (excluding fuels)1 |
5.7 |
-0.7 |
-6.7 |
14.3 |
Goods exports (excluding agriculture) 1 |
-4.8 |
1.9 |
-1.5 |
-9.0 |
Services exports (excluding transportation) 1 |
-0.7 |
-6.6 | ||
Number of employee posts in the private sector |
-0.1 |
0.2 | ||
Rate of vacant employee posts out of total number of employed people in the business sector2 |
3.8 |
3.7 |
3.7 |
3.7 |
Building starts3 |
-0.1 |
-2.7 |
1 Foreign trade indices are quantitative (in contrast to CBS monthly foreign trade indices).
2 The rate of job vacancies at its actual level, seasonally adjusted and smoothed.
3 Six-month moving average.
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