U.S. Non-Manufacturing Increases In June

July 6, 2005
Complementing last week's report last that U.S. manufacturing activity had increased in June, data released July 6 by the Tempe, Ariz.-based Institute for Supply Management (ISM) show business activity among U.S. non-manufacturers also picked up in June. ...

Complementing last week's report last that U.S. manufacturing activity had increased in June, data released July 6 by the Tempe, Ariz.-based Institute for Supply Management (ISM) show business activity among U.S. non-manufacturers also picked up in June. The ISM's business activity index for non-manufacturers was 62.2% last month, a gain of 3.7 percentage points from May's 58.5%.

A figure above 50% indicates that the non-manufacturing sector of the U.S. economy is growing; a figure below 50% signals it is contracting.

June's increase in non-manufacturing activity follows two consecutive months of decline in the rate of growth. However, the details in the June data reveal a mixed business picture. For example, while both new orders and the backlog of orders among non-manufacturers continued to grow in June, they did so at a slower rate than in May. And both employment among non-manufacturers and prices paid by non-manufacturers increased faster in June than during May.

The gain in U.S. manufacturing activity in June, reported by ISM on July 1, was 2.4 percentage points to an index figure of 53.8%. It followed six consecutive months during which growth in the manufacturing sector had slowed. Notably, new orders among manufacturers grew 5.5% between May and June, a contrast to the two-tenths percent decline in the growth rate of new orders among non-manufacturers during the same period.

ISM's non-manufacturing index is based on data from about 370 purchasing and supply executives in companies that include firms in finance and banking, mining and utilities. ISM's manufacturing index is based on data from purchasing and supply executives in more than 400 industrial companies.

About the Author

John McClenahen | Former Senior Editor, IndustryWeek

 John S. McClenahen, is an occasional essayist on the Web site of IndustryWeek, the executive management publication from which he retired in 2006. He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at Westinghouse Broadcasting’s KYW in Cleveland, Ohio. In May 1967, he joined Penton Media Inc. in Cleveland and in September 1967 was transferred to Washington, DC, the base from which for nearly 40 years he wrote primarily about national and international economics and politics, and corporate social responsibility.
      
      McClenahen, a native of Ohio now residing in Maryland, is an award-winning writer and photographer. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently An Unexpected Poet (2013), and several books of photographs, including Black, White, and Shades of Grey (2014). He also is the author of a children’s book, Henry at His Beach (2014).
      
      His photograph “Provincetown: Fog Rising 2004” was selected for the Smithsonian Institution’s 2011 juried exhibition Artists at Work and displayed in the S. Dillon Ripley Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., from June until October 2011. Five of his photographs are in the collection of St. Lawrence University and displayed on campus in Canton, New York.
      
      John McClenahen’s essay “Incorporating America: Whitman in Context” was designated one of the five best works published in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies during the twelve-year editorship of R. Barry Leavis of Rollins College. John McClenahen’s several journalism prizes include the coveted Jesse H. Neal Award. He also is the author of the commemorative poem “Upon 50 Years,” celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Wolfson College Cambridge, and appearing in “The Wolfson Review.”
      
      John McClenahen received a B.A. (English with a minor in government) from St. Lawrence University, an M.A., (English) from Western Reserve University, and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from Georgetown University, where he also pursued doctoral studies. At St. Lawrence University, he was elected to academic honor societies in English and government and to Omicron Delta Kappa, the University’s highest undergraduate honor. John McClenahen was a participant in the 32nd Annual Wharton Seminars for Journalists at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the Easter Term of the 1986 academic year, John McClenahen was the first American to hold a prestigious Press Fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.
      
      John McClenahen has served on the Editorial Board of Confluence: The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and was co-founder and first editor of Liberal Studies at Georgetown. He has been a volunteer researcher on the William Steinway Diary Project at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and has been an assistant professorial lecturer at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
      

 

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