The Bank of Israel's Composite State of the Economy Index for October 2016 increased by 0.1 percent, lower than its rate of growth since the beginning of the year. The declines in goods exports and in imports of manufacturing inputs in October, and the decline in the Industrial Production Index in September were the main contributors to the slowdown in the growth of the index. In contrast, the increase in the trade and services revenue indices and the continued increase in the import of consumer products contributed to the increase in the Composite Index.
The index for September was slightly revised downward (Table 1), due among other things to the downward revision in data on the import of manufacturing inputs. 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 |
October |
0.1 | |
September |
0.33 |
0.24 |
August |
0.24 |
0.25 |
July |
0.23 |
0.28 |
Table 2: Changes in the Index components in recent months3
(monthly percent change, unless otherwise noted)
October 2016 |
September 2016 |
August 2016 |
July 2016 | |
Industrial Production Index (excluding mining and quarrying) |
-1.2 |
3.2 |
-5.0 | |
Services Revenue Index (excluding education, and public administration) |
1.6 |
-1.3 |
-2.4 | |
Retail Trade Revenue Index |
1.9 |
-2.4 |
2.0 | |
Imports of consumer goods1 |
0.8 |
8.6 |
-4.3 |
-1.3 |
Imports of manufacturing inputs (excluding fuels)1 |
-0.9 |
-0.8 |
-2.7 |
2.5 |
Goods exports (excluding agriculture) 1 |
-5.1 |
1.6 |
-4.4 |
-0.1 |
Services exports (excluding transportation) 1 |
1.7 |
-5.6 | ||
Number of employee posts in the private sector |
0.0 |
0.4 | ||
Rate of vacant employee posts out of total number of employed people in the business sector2 |
3.7 |
3.6 |
4.0 |
4.0 |
1 Foreign trade indices are quantitative (in contrast to CBS monthly foreign trade indices).
2 The job vacancy rate is included in the Index at its level, seasonally adjusted and smoothed.
3 Since the Central Bureau of Statistics stopped publishing monthly figures on building starts, beginning in July 2016 the method of calculation of the building starts component of the Index was changed. The component is calculated at a quarterly frequency, and the change (seasonally adjusted, in percent) is attributed to the last month of the quarter for which the figure is published. The last figure published is for the second quarter (relating to June), and it shows an increase of 10.3 percent. The other months in the quarter are missing values for which the variable value is estimated in the model.
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