News

The economic recovery in the Bay Area and California is gaining steam, analysts said Thursday, yet the pace of job growth is being hampered by new technologies that enable employers to limit hiring. Economists with the closely watched UCLA Anderson Forecast say the Bay Area is leading the economic rebound in California, and that California is leading the nation. But the upswing is uneven. “This is a bifurcated recovery,” said Anderson Forecast senior economist Jerry Nickelsburg.

Economists at the UCLA Anderson Forecast said Thursday that the pace of job growth has slowed in the Golden State, raising fears that structural problems in the labor market will temper future employment gains. UCLA economists said in their quarterly forecast that a large proportion of California workers’ education and training is obsolete for jobs in technology and other industries that require “21st century” skills.

California’s economy is in for more of the steady, unspectacular growth the state has experienced the past few years, according to a new forecast. The latest UCLA Anderson Forecast, released today , says California can expected a continued fall in unemployment in the coming years, with the Sacramento region and the rest of the Central Valley still lagging the more prosperous coastal regions. Overall, the state continues to outperform the national economy, with job growth of 2.8 percent over the past 12 months, and the gap between the U.S. and California unemployment rates has been cut in half to 1.4 percent.

California lawmakers took a major step Thursday toward lowering the state’s high electricity prices—and set the stage for a big battle over incentives that have turned the state into the biggest market for residential-rooftop solar power. A bill passed by the legislature Thursday repeals a 2001 law, meant to encourage conservation, which requires the state’s investor-owned utilities to sell power at rates that rise sharply the more electricity a customer uses. The new legislation doesn’t say how prices should be set in the future, leaving that to regulators, utilities and public advocates to work out.

Democratic Senate Leader Darrell Steinberg is shelving most of his effort to streamline the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, this year. The decision came late Wednesday night at the end of the second-to-last day of legislative session.

Regional entrepreneurship ecosystems, aka startup communities, are being studied and touted as the next new thing in economic development for cities and metropolitan areas across the country—especially in the high-technology and information technology (ICT) sectors. And for good reason. According to a report by Ian Hathaway of Engine that looked closely at the dynamism of the high-tech and ICT sectors in the United States, particularly new and young companies, these are the firms that create jobs at the fastest pace and are important drivers of economic growth.

The five states with the highest average combined rates are Tennessee (9.44 percent), Arkansas (9.18 percent), Louisiana (8.89 percent), Washington (8.87 percent), and Oklahoma (8.72 percent). . . California, which raised its sales and income taxes through the initiative process in November of 2012, has the highest state-level rate at 7.5 percent.] Five states tie for the second-highest statewide rate with 7 percent each: Indiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Tennessee.

California’s job market is experiencing a sustained increase in employment as the state continues to emerge from the Great Recession. However, even with unemployment falling, California’s job market recovery has not reached large segments of California’s workers. After more than three years of job growth, the pace of the recovery has been on par with that of previous recoveries in the state, which is bad news for California’s workers given the historic severity of job losses during the Great Recession. A majority of California counties still have unemployment rates in the double digits, and long-term unemployment remains a serious concern: More than two in five unemployed Californians have been searching for work for at least six months. And for those who do have work, this recovery has not yet produced the mix of jobs that would lead to broad-based economic growth. California’s recovery has disproportionately relied on low-wage service industries for job growth, and jobs generally have not returned in occupations that tend to pay wages in the middle of the earnings distribution. These weaknesses in the current recovery mean that challenges facing California even before the recession began, such as wage stagnation and widening inequality, continue today.

Over time, however, complying with CEQA became not only a torturous slog through very expensive red tape – one that elevated complex process over final product – but a tool for interest groups to engage in what can only be described as extortion. Do something for us, they could and sometimes would implicitly threaten, or we’ll tie up your project in court for years or even decades and it will die an expensive, lingering death. Many payoff demands have absolutely nothing to do with environmental protection.

Employers added a softer-than-expected 169,000 jobs in August and the unemployment rate dipped slightly to 7.3 percent, the government said Friday in a status-quo jobs report that showed the workforce participation rate at its lowest level in 35 years.

The disappointing jobs report released Friday leaves Federal Reserve officials without a clear-cut signal of an economy on the mend, creating a dilemma for the central bank as it contemplates pulling back on a landmark bond-buying program designed to stoke growth.

. . . But beneath such positive numbers lay evidence of a job market stuck in second gear. The government revised down its estimate for June and July hiring by a combined 74,000 jobs, and a disproportionate share of the jobs that are being added are in low-paying sectors such as restaurants and retail. At the recent pace of hiring, the economy won’t get back to prerecession levels of employment, adjusting for population growth, for more than eight years.

The visualization below, created by Caren Weiner Campbell of Synoptical Charts, shows where nonacademic STEM Ph.D.’s reside in the United States, in the major categories of life sciences, physical sciences, technology, and mathematics. The states shown in darker hues have a higher raw number of people in the category. There’s a lot of information, and I encourage you to mouse over your states of interest and click around.

Part-time work spiked during the recent recession and has stayed stubbornly high, raising concerns that elevated part-time employment represents a “new normal” in the labor market. However, recent movements and current levels of part-time work are largely within historical norms, despite increases for selected demographic groups, such as prime-age workers with a high-school degree or less. In that respect, the continued high incidence of part-time work likely reflects a slow labor market recovery and does not portend permanent changes in the proportion of part-time jobs.

This report is the successor to Help Wanted: Projections of Jobs and Education Demand through 2018, in which we examined the connections between educational attainment and educational demand in the labor market.