by Calculated Risk on 5/04/2011 12:23:00 PM

Here are two scatter graphs showing the relationship between the ISM employment indexes for manufacturing and service, and monthly changes in BLS payroll employment.

Click on graph for larger image in graph gallery.

This graph shows the relationship between the ISM manufacturing employment index and the change in BLS manufacturing employment (as a percent of the previous month employment).

The yellow dot is a forecast for April based on the ISM employment reading of 62.7. This suggests about 50,000 manufacturing jobs added in April (although there is plenty of noise, and R-squared is 0.62.

The second graph shows the relationship between the ISM non-manufacturing employment index and the change in BLS private service employment (also as a percent of the previous month employment).

This is also noisy (R-squared is 0.68), but a reading of 51.9 suggests an increase of about 110,000 service sector payroll jobs in April (blue dot on graph). So the ISM reports suggests private sector job growth in April of close to the 179,000 reported by ADP this morning.