China

As the Chinese economy reopens, we’re carefully scrutinising high-frequency datasets to track early impacts on the global economy. We’ve just added daily flight traffic statistics from VariFlight. The dataset covers flights on the Chinese mainland, flights to Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, and international flights. 

In the chart below, we track the number of international flights against the Oxford Stringency Index – a composite measure of government reponses to the pandemic, such as workplace closures and transit restrictions. The message is clear: since zero-Covid measures were unwound, the Chinese are traveling abroad more and more. 

Japan

We’ve expanded the coverage of the Indeed job-postings publication to include Japan. 

In the chart below, we display a measure of how the job market has changed since the pandemic. We show the industries that have the largest and smallest gains in job postings versus Feb. 1, 2020. Arts and entertainment, in particular, has boomed in the past three months.

United States 

We’ve added a new dataset from the US Census: the Quarterly Survey of Plant Capacity Utilization (QPC). The dataset covers various sub-sectors of the US economy and includes questionnaire responses related to the main factors affecting a decrease in capacity utilisation, as well as the difference in capacity versus actual operations. 

In the chart below, we created a diffusion index across the 91 sectors, grouping them in brackets that reflect capacity utilisation at a given point in time. 

During periods of economic turmoil, capacity utilisation decreases across all sectors. For example, during the first quarter of 2009, 30 percent of industries were down to using less than half of their capacity – the highest proportion at any moment on our chart. Almost no industries were running at 90 percent-plus capacity. 

Interestingly, since 2021, a majority of US industries are running with capacity utilisation above 70 percent, as the orange line indicates. 

South Korea

We’ve added online job advertisement growth rates from Statistics Korea. The dataset is broken down by education and industry and is available in a weekly frequency. 

As such, it can be used as an early indicator of labour market conditions. In the chart below, we compared the period-over-period change of online job advertisements (inverting the axis) with the unemployment rate. Looking at the best correlation, it appears that this indicator leads unemployment by four weeks.