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Part of the reason unemployment declined may be that for the first time in years, the state labor force shrank last month. About 9,000 Californians dropped out of the job market in May. 

Our jobless rate ranks 34th in the nation, better than neighboring Arizona and Nevada, but worse than other big states such as Florida, New York and Texas. While the lowest in nine years, the rate was 5.2 percent in May, with nearly 1 million Californians actively looking for work but unable to find it.

But as LAO researchers also pointed out, the global GDP numbers that suggest California’s economy as sixth largest in the world don’t take into account something of huge importance: The cost of living. . . .Once that’s factored in, the IMF data finds California drops from sixth to eleventh in the global size of its gross domestic product.

California has benefited more than any other state from the software explosion, the Software Alliance report said. The industry and its attendant fields contributed more than a quarter of total business research and development investment in California, the group estimated.

For the second year in a row, California is the top state in the nation for film production. But the share of movies being shot in the Golden State fell from 21 percent in 2014 to 17 percent last year, a new study found.

The BEA pegged the state’s economic output last year at $2.46 trillion and with several of its international rivals, particularly Brazil and France, experiencing slumps, that would place California at sixth place, behind only the U.S., China, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Both California and Oregon’s economies expanded at a 4.1% seasonally adjusted annual rate, leading the nation. Texas was next at 3.8%, suggesting much of the state’s economy had diversified enough to shrug off the collapse in oil prices.

The report by The Campaign for College Opportunity said California ranks near the bottom nationally in the rate of bachelor and associate degrees in those subjects at a time that it has far more STEM entry-level jobs than any other state.

After years of lagging behind Arkansas, West Virginia and several other states, California is expanding computer science in public schools across the state and training teachers to teach it. 

The manufacturing sector shed 10,000 jobs, and has shown job losses in three of the past four months. Year-over-year growth in manufacturing employment has been negative for three months in a row, and it would appear that whatever manufacturing employment renaissance occurred in the years immediately following the Great Recession is over. . . Part of the answer came this week in the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, which suggests that manufacturing employment weakness may be a result of a lack of labor supply, not lack of demand. Manufacturing job openings in April jumped to a 15-year high.

In 1970, both cities boasted powerful industry clusters, similar concentrations of manufacturing firms, and highly educated and technically oriented workforces employed by innovative companies (Amgen in L.A., Genentech in the Bay Area). Prior to the 1990s, Los Angeles actually produced more patents than the Bay Area.

Forecasters have sharply lowered their expectations for job growth in the coming year after employers added just 38,000 jobs in May, according to The Wall Street Journal’s latest survey of academic, business and financial economists.

The number of people hired in April fell to 5.1 million, down from 5.3 million in March and 5.5 million in February. That works out to a hiring rate of 3.5%, the slowest pace since August of 2014. While the hiring rate has improved since the worst periods of 2009 and 2010, employers have yet to return to hiring at the pace they did a decade ago.

Wednesday’s report on the monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) has intensified concerns among some economists that the U.S. economy is running out of people who want jobs and are qualified to fill existing openings. 

In California, the forecast anticipates continued steady gains in employment through 2018 and a steady decrease in the unemployment rate over the next two years. California’s unemployment rate is expected to be insignificantly different from the U.S. rate at 5.1 percent by the end of the forecast period.