Mumbai: April 5, 2016: BSE, the world’s fastest stock exchange with the speed of 6 microseconds and CMIE, India’s leading business information company, have joined hands to launch world’s first high-frequency data on unemployment and consumer sentiments. Incidentally, this is the first instance of non-governmental organisations producing an unemployment measure for any country in the world.

India does not have a fast-frequency measure of unemployment. This joint effort by BSE and CMIE will produce a 30-day moving average measure of the unemployment rate in India, every day and a monthly unemployment rate at the end of every month. It takes into account all observations available for a calendar month and are available from January, 2016.

For consumer sentiment indices, University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, Survey Research Centre has partnered with BSE and CMIE. University of Michigan is a leader in producing consumer sentiment indices in the US that had commenced its first Survey of Consumers in 1946. These indices would consist of 30-day moving average measures of consumer sentiments on a daily basis. Its two major constituents are index of current economic conditions and the index of consumer expectations.

The indices are based on response received from over 130,000 individuals in about 39,600 households, both in rural and urban India. The rural and urban break-up of each of the indices have also been released. State wise unemployment rates are also planned to be released after a few months. These indices can accessed freely from www.bseindia.com/bsecmieindices

All indices are being launched as public goods, free for public consumption. These vitally important indicators for India are expected to help policymakers, investors, entrepreneurs, academia, the media and the public at large get a better grip of macro- economic status of Indian economy.