Strategic Communications and Marketing News Bureau

Flash Index of Illinois economy indicates growth, albeit at slower pace

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – The July University of Illinois Flash Economic Index remained virtually unchanged, rising to 106.1 from its 106.0 reading in June.

The index is now midway in the 105.1 to 107.1 range that it has occupied since April of last year. “The July result suggests that the state economy is still moving forward at a good rate even though the pace of the national economy seems to be slowing,” J. Fred Giertz, the Illinois professor of economics who compiles the data, said today.

He noted that the Illinois unemployment rate fell slightly below the national rate in June for the first time since March 1999.

Individual income- and corporate-tax receipts were up slightly last month in real (inflation-adjusted) terms from July a year ago, while sales-tax receipts were down somewhat.

The Flash Index is a weighted average of state growth rates in consumer spending, corporate earnings and personal income. Tax receipts from these categories are adjusted for inflation before growth rates are calculated. The growth rate for each component is then calculated for the 12-month period using data through July 31.

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Engineering Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Nishant Garg, center, is joined by fellow researchers, from left: Yujia Min, Hossein Kabir, Nishant Garg, center, Chirayu Kothari and M. Farjad Iqbal, front right. In front are examples of clay samples dissolved at different concentrations in a NaOH solution. The team invented a new test that can predict the performance of cementitious materials in mere 5 minutes. This is in contrast to the standard ASTM tests, which take up to 28 days. This new advance enables real-time quality control at production plants of emerging, sustainable materials. Photo taken at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign on Monday, Feb. 3, 2025. (Photo by Fred Zwicky / University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

Researchers develop a five-minute quality test for sustainable cement industry materials

A new test developed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign can predict the performance of a new type of cementitious construction material in five minutes — a significant improvement over the current industry standard method, which takes seven or more days to complete. This development is poised to advance the use of next-generation resources called supplementary cementitious materials — or SCMs — by speeding up the quality-check process before leaving the production floor.

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