lag is a few quarters of a year. The unemployment rate is a lagging indicator: employment tends to increase two or three quarters after an upturn in the general economy.. In a performance measuring system, profit earned by a business is a lagging indicator as it reflects a historical performance; similarly, improved customer satisfaction is the result of initiatives taken in the past. The Index of Lagging Indicators is published monthly by The Conference Board, a non-governmental organization, which determines the value of the index from seven components. The Index tends to follow changes in the overall economy. The components on the Conference Board's index are: The average duration of unemployment (inverted) The value of outstanding commercial and industrial loans The change in the Consumer Price Index for services The change in labour cost per unit of output The ratio of manufacturing and trade inventories to sales The ratio of consumer credit outstanding to personal income The average prime rate charged by banks Coincident indicators Coincident indicators change at approximately the same time as the whole economy, thereby providing information about the current state of the economy. There are many coincident economic indicators, such as Gross Domestic Product, industrial production, personal income and retail sales. A coincident index may be used to identify, after the fact, the dates of peaks and troughs in the business cycle. There are four economic statistics comprising the Index of Coincident Economic Indicators: Number of employees on non-agricultural payrolls Personal income less transfer payments Industrial production Manufacturing and trade sale The Philadelphia Federal Reserve produces state-level coincident indexes based on 4 state-level variables: Nonfarm payroll employment Average hours worked in manufacturing Unemployment rate Wage and salary disbursements deflated by the consumer price index (U.S. city average) By direction There are also three terms that describe an economic indicator's direction relative to the direction of the general economy: Procyclical indicators move in the same direction as the general economy: they increase when the economy is doing well; decrease when it is doing badly. Gross domestic product (GDP) is a procyclic indicator. Countercyclical indicators move in the opposite direction to the general economy. The unemployment rate and the wage share are countercyclic: in the short run they rise when the economy is deteriorating. Acyclical indicators are those with little or no correlation to the business cycle: they may rise or fall when the general economy is doing