Bloomberg BNA’s Wage Trend Indicator Predicts Steady Wage Growth

 According to Bloomberg’s most recent Wage Trend Indicator (WTI), private sector workers should expect their wages to increase at nearly the same rate as in recent years, with the index remaining virtually unchanged from Q1 2013 to Q2. The index for the second quarter of 2013 stood at 98.72 while Q1 readings were at 98.73. The past two years have seen the WTI only fluctuate between 98.47 and 98.75.

“The labor market is showing signs of slow improvement but has not strengthened enough to cause a pickup in wage growth,” said economist Kathryn Kobe, consultant and contributor to the WTI database.

The annual rate of private sector wage gains is expected to remain at about a 1.7 percent increase over the next several months, mirror the increased posted in Q1. Of the seven components of the WTI, three were positive contributors to the Q2 reading, three factors were negative, and one was neutral, indicating mixed economic conditions.

The positive contributors were the unemployment rate, job losers as a share of the labor force, and industrial production. The negative factors were predictions of the rate of inflation, average hourly earnings of production and non-supervisory workers, and the share of employers planning to hire production and service workers in the short term. The remaining neutral factor was the share of employers with difficulty filling professional and technical jobs.