Government Debt in Europe

Google Data Explorer is cool

LEHD vs LED?

Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) is an innovative program within the U.S. Census Bureau. We use modern statistical and computing techniques to combine federal and state administrative data on employers and employees with core Census Bureau censuses and surveys while protecting the confidentiality of people and firms that provide the data.

Local Employment Dynamics (LED) is a voluntary partnership between state labor market information agencies and the U.S. Census Bureau to develop new information about local labor market conditions at low cost, with no added respondent burden, and with the same confidentiality protections afforded census and survey data.

See also the following post from David Warsch;

Now meet Julia Lane.

Lane, 54, director of the Science of Science and Innovation Policy Program of the National Science Foundation, spearheaded the creation of the Longitudinal Employment-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program of the US Census Bureau, an enormous innovative data base – a “frame” of jobs over time — that permits the real world of the US economy to be interrogated by the models of unemployment dynamics for which Peter Diamond, Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides shared the Nobel Prize in economics last week.

Instead of a Mention in Dispatches from Stockholm, what Lane got was the Vladimir Chavrid Memorial Award.

Don’t feel sorry for her, though. For one thing, she’s very much alive. For another, the ebullient New Zealander much more nearly resembles another Julia, Julia Child, than the somewhat dour Rosalind Franklin. And of course there’s that Chavrid Award.

Because I knew her to be immersed in the practical details of unemployment dynamics, Lane was the first person I called after the Nobel prizes were announced last October. We hadn’t talked for long before I began to realize that her story was as interesting as the winners’.

It began in 1994, when Lane read an article by Simon Burgess, of the University of Bristol, “The Flow of Unemployment in Britain.” I had been working on looking at the flow of workers through firms and I knew that even firms that had no change in employment across quarters both hired and fired workers simultaneously. But in his model firms had a desired level of employment, and only hired until they reached it and after that they didn’t do anything more. So I called him up and I said, you don’t know me from a bar of soap but that model is just dead wrong. What my data show is that even when firms don’t change their employment levels there’s this huge churn through the work force. Even firms that are laying workers off are still hiring.”

Random Charts

Data Driven Life

The Quantified Self

The Pomodoro Technique

Cure Together
Cure Together, which allows you to enter your symptoms—for, say, "anxiety" or "insomnia"—and the various remedies you've tried to feel better. One thing the site does is aggregate this information and present the results in chart form.

Fuelly

Zazengo

Rescue Time

and more

The Joys of Stats

Visualization of the Day

How data travels from phone to computer

Employment Cost Index- the most comprehensive measure of labor costs!

Employment Cost Index-

Compensation costs for civilian workers increased 0.6 percent, seasonally adjusted, for the 3-month period ending March 2010, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Wages and salaries (which make up about 70 percent of compensation costs) increased 0.4 percent while benefits (which make up the remaining 30 percent of compensation)--increased 1.1 percent

Table A. Major series of the Employment Cost Index (Percent change)
Table 6. Employment Cost Index for total compensation(1), for private industry workers, by bargaining status and census region and division



Related:
Public Sector Pay Outpaces Private Pay;

The chart shows that public and private sector pay rose in parallel from 2001 to 2004. Then the lines diverged. Since early 2005, public sector pay has risen by 5% in real terms. Meanwhile, private sector pay has been flat.

Development Indicator Watch- ICT

International Internet bandwidth (bits per person) -International Internet bandwidth is the contracted capacity of international connections between countries for transmitting Internet traffic.

Source: WDI

Impact on Growth: 'a 10 percentage point growth in broadband penetration can raise annual economic growth per person by up to 1.5 percentage points'

Related:
Measuring the Information Society 2010;

The latest edition of Measuring the Information Society features the new ITU ICT Development Index (IDI) and the ICT Price Basket - two benchmarking tools to measure the Information Society

World Telecommunication/ICT Development Report 2010;

The Report reviews the 10 targets, proposes concrete indicators to monitor them and makes recommendations on policies and measures to help achieve them:
# To connect villages with ICTs and establish community access points
# To connect universities, colleges, secondary schools, and primary schools with ICTs
# To connect scientific and research centers with ICTs
# To connect public libraries, cultural centers, museums, post offices, and archives with ICTs
# To connect health centers and hospitals with ICTs
# To connect all local and central Government departments and establish web sites and e-mail addresses
# To adapt all primary and secondary school curricula to meet the challenges of the information society, taking into account national circumstances
# To ensure that all of the world’s population has access to television and radio services
# To encourage the development of content and put in place technical conditions in order to facilitate the presence and use of all world languages on the Internet
# To ensure that more than half the world’s inhabitants have access to ICTs within their reach

Broadband plan for high speed internet sent to Congress

Internet penetration - who’s online? ;

The country with the highest number of broadband subscribers in absolute terms is the United States, with more than 81 million. However, another way to use the data is to look at broadband penetration – essentially the number of subscriptions per 100 inhabitants. Looked at from this perspective, the Netherlands is the OECD leader, with a broadband penetration rate of about 38%; at the other end of the scale is Mexico, with a rate of just over 6%. It’s worth noting that the number of broadband subscribers isn’t the same as the number of broadband users, which tends generally to be higher...In countries where households tend to be bigger, the number of subscribers may be correspondingly lower.

US The National Broadband Plan

The plan sets ambitious, but achievable goals, including 1-gigabit connections to every community; affordable, 100 megabits broadband to 100 million households; and raising adoption from 65% to 90% adoption, heading to 100%.

Does Lowering the Price of Broadband Increase Its Use?

Malaysia’s broadband plan – stimulating the private sector

DATA:
National ICT Data
ITU's ICT Eye
OECD telecommunication price baskets

Policy Advice:
Building broadband: Strategies and policies for the developing world-Given recent developments in the broadband market involving networks, services, applications, and users, and the experiences of leading markets—especially Korea—this report proposes that broadband be reconceptualized as an ecosystem rather than just high-speed connectivity. Using the ecosystem concept, the report discusses the characteristics of broadband strategies and identifies potentially useful policies and regulations.

*Source of the chart above, Malaysia Economic Update, Box 13,Developing Broadband in Malaysia

Sunday Economic Indicator - I/S Ratio shows inventory replenishment

Coverage of an economic indicator every week- the idea borrowed from Sunday Function over at Built on Facts blog.


Definition: Inventories / Sales Ratios (Retail) - The inventories / sales ratios show the relationship of the end-of-month values of inventory to the monthly sales. These ratios can be looked at as indications of the number of months of inventory that are on hand in relation to the sales for a month. For example, a ratio of 2.5 would indicate that the retail stores have enough merchandise on hand to cover two and a half months of sales.

Latest Numbers: Inventories/Sales Ratio. The total business inventories/sales ratio based on seasonally adjusted data at the end of February was 1.27. The February 2009 ratio was 1.46.

Implications: 'this is the message of the inventory cycle, which appears to have largely run its course. Inventories surged as the recession intensified, leaving firms scrambling to bring output in line with the new level of sales. Now, firms have inventories under control'

More on the Implications:

Today's data is also encouraging because it shows that any business expansion we've seen in the first part of 2010 isn't outpacing consumer demand, with inventory levels remaining nearly flat. Considering how strong retail sales were in March, there's also reason to believe that inventories will fall during the month -- unless more hiring produced additional goods to compensate for the increased buying. Given the current balance of inventories and sales, there's little reason to believe U.S. businesses should engage in many more mass layoffs unless consumer demand unexpectedly weakens significantly.

Over at Macroblog more analysis;

I have been pondering those data as well, ever since the advance fourth quarter gross domestic product report indicated that 3.4 percentage points of the then-reported 5.9 percent annualized growth rate was accounted for by a slowing in the pace of inventory decumulation. (The numbers have subsequently been revised to 3.8 percentage points of a 5.6 percent growth rate.) It certainly appears that inventory-sales ratios have reverted to the prerecession norm, justifying Duy's sense that inventories will not be a big part of the economic story as we move through 2010.

That conclusion does rest, of course, on the likelihood that a downward trend in the ratio truly did break in the middle part of the decade. As the chart shows, the same pause in the trend occurred in the mid-1990s, only to commence its southward trek on the other side of the 2001 recession.

But the situation is even more curious than that. If you dig a little deeper, you find that not all inventory-sales ratios tell the same story. In particular, inventory-to-sales ratios at the retail level look very lean relative to prerecession levels while manufacturer's inventories still appear to be relatively bloated.

What, exactly, is that chart trying to tell us? Does it represent some shift in supply-chain management, with inventory holdings being pushed down from the retail level to manufacturers? If not, can we expect some resurgence in retail inventories (as the Duy-cited Bloomberg article suggests), coupled with continued decumulation at the manufacturing level? And what would be the net effect of such developments on aggregate inventory levels?

From Bloomberg: The ratio of business inventories to sales was 1.25 in January, just above a 29-year low of 1.24 set in 2006 and down from a recession high of 1.46 in January 2009. The ratio averaged 1.3 in the last economic expansion, from 2001 to 2007.

Other tables released with the data;

Table 1. Estimated Monthly Sales and Inventories for Manufacturers, Retailers, and Merchant Wholesalers
Table 2. Percent Changes for Sales and Inventories--Manufacturers, Retailers, and Merchant Wholesalers
Table 3. Estimated Monthly Retail Sales, Inventories, and Inventories/Sales Ratios, By Kind of Business

Comments: Businesses generally prefer 1.45 months worth of goods. Though a lagging indicator, a window onto future orders and production activity. Remember GDP is calculated by adding all the sales in the economy plus change in inventories.

Related:
Manufacturing and Trade Inventory-to-Sales Ratio: Inventory Adjustment Over;

inventory to sales ratio. This has declined sharply to 1.25 (SA) from the peak of 1.46 back in Dec 2008. This could decline further - the trend is definitely down over time - but clearly most of the inventory adjustment is over.

This is important because the change in inventory added significantly to Q4 GDP growth. (See BEA line 13: the contribution to GDP in Q4 from 'Change in private inventories' was 3.88 of the 5.9 percent annualized increase in GDP.)

Inventories to Sales on Google Fast Flip

What We Don’t Know About the Economy