ABSTRACT
In our work in the United States on leading indicators we have long been interested not only in the possibilities for improving indicator systems by including survey indexes, but most particularly we have been much interested in developing promptly available indexes. It is well known that historically one of the major advantages has been that the results are often available significantly before comparable quantitative measures covering the same types of economic activity. We have reported at past CIRET conferences on various aspects of this work, and have shown that inclusion of survey data in leading indexes had two major advantages; it enabled us to cover types of activity for which quantitative data were not available at all in many countries, and it enabled us to lengthen the forecasts by including qualitative data available significantly earlier than a comparable quantitative series to which the survey pertained.
In recent years we have turned our attention to the development of leading indexes incorporating promptly available data. A major development of the past twenty years has been the availability in the United States of many series, both quantitative and qualitative, before the end of the month after the month to which the data pertain. This is our working definition of “promptly available” and the present paper is devoted to assessing the performance of indexes composed of such series in the United States in recent years.
In 1990, Geoffrey H. Moore and John P. Cullity wrote a report, “Promptly Available Economic Indicators”, (Moore and Cullity, 1990) which dealt with their initial work on the development of a new promptly available leading index for the United States. The present paper updates that work by applying it to two new promptly available indexes at the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) and to the revised leading index maintained now by the Conference Board (a private organization representing a group of major corporate enterprises). 1 It is a revision of the leading composite index published by the U.S. Department of Commerce from the early 1960s until late 1995.
Such an effort is particularly timely now because the ECRI indexes are new and the Conference Board Index has been revised. An integral part of the work on monitoring the U.S. Leading Index from its inception at the National Bureau of Economic Research through the Commerce Department years has always included reconsidering periodically which series ought to be included in the index in light of newly available series, changes in coverage or calculation, etc. Not only has this benchmark leading index been revised since the 1990 study, but the promptly available leading indexes calculated at the Economic22 Cycle Research Institute have also undergone some revisions. It is to the record of these indexes that we now turn.
