The full set of Import/Export Price Indexes is currently being loaded from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These figures are indexes, not dollar amounts.
An interesting trend is the 12-month change in total imports, currently at an all-time high since data collection started in 1983.
Trends in private employment wages, with links back to the BLS data series from the Current Employment Statistics program.
I see no explanation on the BLS site of why the hourly and weekly figures are different. This might just be an artifact of the way the raw data is collected.
EPI says real wage reversal persists:
First, falling real wages will likely lead to diminished consumption, reinforcing slower macroeconomic growth. Second, the reality of squeezed paychecks for most workers helps to explain the primacy of economic concerns among voters in the presidential primaries.
In Union Rates Increase in 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research quotes labor figures indicating that labor union membership increased last year, the first such increase since union membership data collection began in 1983.
The CEPR article cites Unionstats.com as the source of their data, though the original source of this data is the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The BLS issued a press release on January 25 with many of the same figures.
The main data series with total union membership figures is BLS series LUU0203161800. All 1,200 union affiliated datasets will be available on Numbrary under the BLS Union Affiliation Data page.
Some Datasets Available on the Web – a terrific list of public datasets.
This list includes text sources, reference materials and a lot of other items besides links to numeric data.
Another economic indicator that gets a lot of media attention is the monthly change in orders for durable goods. This figure is produced by M3 Survey from the US Census Bureau.
Numbrary has a mirror for this source here:
The BLS just released their December 2007 Consumer Price Index figures. Covered by the Times under the title “Inflation Continues to Edge Up”.
Here are some of the relevant inflation data series in Numbrary:
Every month the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes new statistics on the US labor market. These data releases are routinely covered by major media outlets and research firms. The last release was for December 2007. The BLS always posts a lengthy Employment Situation Summary when it releases new data; the outside coverage is much more succinct. Here is a statement from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Numbrary mirrors all the key BLS employment datasets, including:
These datasets will be updated monthly when new figures are released by the BLS.
Several new data sources have been added to Numbrary over the last few days, including:
Many Eyes is an excellent site for generating high-quality interactive visualizations of tabular data.
They just rolled out a key new feature – the ability to edit data after it has been uploaded to the system. Swivel implemented a similar feature a couple of months ago. The Many Eyes implementation is a bit more substantial than Swivel’s – Swivel lets you add, edit or delete existing rows, while Many Eyes permits the creation of additional rows, with some calculation features thrown in.
More importantly, Many Eyes keeps an annotated version history of the changes, and you can inspect previous versions. Unfortunately, only the latest version is “live” – you can’t apply visualizations to old versions. Swivel is similarly limited – with no history, you can’t compare visualizations generated from old and new versions of a given data set.
Both the Swivel and Many Eyes implementations of the editing function are quite awkward from a usability standpoint. I expect that these will improve in the future.
Users can now contribute new data sources to Numbrary directly, either by web address or by providing your own comma-separated data file. Try it here.
