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Driven largely by immigrants, California’s population registered its highest annual growth rate in nearly a decade, according to a new report analyzing the fiscal year that ended July 1.

The Bay Area is the only region in California where more people are moving in from elsewhere in the United States than moving out, another sign of the tech industry’s rebound and the creation of more jobs here, according to a state population report released Thursday.

The number of people filing new jobless claims across the country skyrocketed by 68,000 to 368,000, according to a weekly report from the U.S. Department of Labor. California saw numbers go in the opposite direction, with a huge drop in new claims.

Through the difficult budgets of recent years, “a lot of my frustration was that there’s not a lot of research that indicates what a good investment is” to abate poverty and reduce inequality, he said. Just as the Legislature’s Environmental Caucus has been instrumental in developing landmark legislation that has put California ahead of the nation and world on various issues, so too does DeSaulnier hope this new caucus will do likewise.

One in five Los Angeles area employers plan to hire more workers during the first quarter, the best showing in several years, according to a survey released today from Manpower Inc.

In nominal dollars, households already recouped their lost wealth a year ago. But adjusting for inflation, Americans’ net worth is still about 0.5% shy of the peak in the third quarter of 2007, just before the recession hit.

The net worth of U.S. households and nonprofit organizations—the values of homes, stocks and other assets minus debts and other liabilities—rose 2.6%, or about $1.9 trillion, in the third quarter of 2013 to $77.3 trillion, the highest on record, according to the Federal Reserve.

The economy still faces challenges, the National Assn. for Business Economists said Monday. But most participants in the group’s quarterly survey expect there will be enough growth for the Federal Reserve to start reducing a key stimulus program in the first half of next year.

U.S. employers are gaining confidence heading into year’s end, hiring at the quickest clip since before Washington’s political dysfunction rattled consumers and businesses this fall.

The U.S. economy expanded significantly faster than initially estimated in the third quarter as businesses fattened their inventories, a factor that is likely to weigh on growth in the year’s final quarter.

Employers added about 200,000 jobs in each of the past two months. Compared with the summer, when a string of disappointing reports led to fears of a cooling labor market, the recent rebound is encouraging, especially given that it happened despite October’s partial government shutdown. But the overall pace of job growth remains too weak to quickly recoup the losses of the deep 2008-2009 recession. Worse, there is little sign that growth is picking up from its good-but-not-great trend: The economy has added 2.3 million jobs over the past year, a pace that has changed little for the past two years.

On December 4, Governance Studies at Brookings hosted an event to highlight the importance of understanding the workforce skills gap in order to create effective public policies aimed at creating equitable economic growth in America.

Construction industry employment has been one of the fastest growing job sectors in Los Angeles County over the last year, driven in large part by a resurgent housing market and continued demand for multi-family housing.

The labor market recovery in the East Bay has been relatively lackluster during recent months, although the slowdown is expected to be temporary. According to the California Employment Development Department, the East Bay’s August payroll number was 992,200, just about the average of the preceding months. On a year-over-year basis, nonfarm employment increased by 0.8%, or 7,800 jobs in total.

The South Bay continues to be one of the regions driving California’s overall employment growth. For the first eight months of 2013, total nonfarm employment in the South Bay was up 3% over the same period last year. The state, on the other hand, was up 1.7%.