United States

For the United States, we’ve added a new high frequency indicator: the CARTS Index. CARTS (Chicago Fed Advance Retail Trade Summary) is a weekly index developed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago to track retail trade spending in a higher frequency than the headline monthly indicator from the U.S. Census Bureau. More information on the methodology can be consulted here.

In the chart below we compared CARTS and the main monthly Retail Trade indicator.

World: Fragile States Index

To keep enhancing our Global ESG Coverage, we’ve just added the Fragile States Index, created by the Fund for Peace.

The Total index, assessing the overall fragility of a country, is constructed around four main sub-indices, highlighting various sources of vulnerability:

• Cohesion
• Economic
• Political
• Social

179 countries are covered in the dataset. More information in the methodology can be consulted here.

In the chart below, we displayed the Top 20 countries having experienced the highest increase of the Total Index in the past 10 years. Interestingly enough, the first two developed economies appearing in the chart are the United States and the United Kingdom, ranking respectively 8 and 10 in the list.

Brazil

For Brazil, we’ve expanded our data coverage from the Brazilian Power System Operators (ONS) with the addition of Hydroelectric Reservoir Data. Brazil is one of the largest producers of hydroelectric power in the world per installed capacity, and hydroelectricity represents a big share of the country’s energy mix.

In the chart below, we took the energy stored (as % of total capacity) in the 4 Brazilian regions, created a national average, and then compared the evolution of the energy stored across the year, for the past 21 years. It appears that 2021 is in the lowest percentile.  

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World: Atlantia Tolls Roads

We’ve recently added traffic performance data from Atlantia, an Italian investment holding company managing toll motorways worldwide as well as several Italian and south-east French airports. Atlantia publishes weekly toll-road traffic indicators for 6 countries:

• Italy
• France
• Spain
• Brazil
• Mexico
• Chile  
  

The chart below displays the 6 variables as YoY% change. While all series increase starting W11 as a result of the pandemic hitting the world a year before, we can group the variables per continent: Latin America (Mexico, Chile, Brazil) versus Southern Europe (France, Italy, Spain), the latter having the highest increase, as a result of the lockdown impact from previous year.