News

The California Film & Television Tax Credit Program (Program) was enacted in February 2009 as part of a targeted economic stimulus package to increase film and television production spending, jobs and tax revenues in California. The Program has just commenced its 5th fiscal year. This report will summarize the Program’s progress from its launch in July 2009 through June 2013, and includes spending estimates and project information for the current fiscal year (July 2013 – June 2014). The report also includes a brief overview of California’s entertainment industry and the growing competition for our state’s motion picture production spending, as well as supplementary background on the changing landscape for scripted television series production.

We project that the U.S., as a result of its increasing competitiveness in manufacturing, will capture $70 billion to $115 billion in annual exports from other nations by the end of the decade. About two-thirds of these export gains could come from production shifts to the U.S. from leading European nations and Japan. By 2020, higher U.S. exports, combined with production work that will likely be “reshored” from China, could create 2.5 million to 5 million American factory and service jobs associated with increased manufacturing.

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.

Unconventional oil and natural gas activity is reshaping America’s energy future and bringing significant benefits to the US economy in terms of jobs, government revenues, and GDP. This study provides the foundation for a dialogue focused on the still-evolving but transformative economic effects of this unconventional revolution.

Boeing is shifting more engineering jobs from Washington state to Southern California, the latest in a series of such changes that could see hundreds of jobs moving away.

Close to three-fourths of construction companies are having a difficult time finding qualified workers and experiencing labor shortages, according to a recent survey from the Associated General Contractors of America, a trade group.

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.

According to Labour Department figures released on Friday, the number of people with jobs fell by 112,000 in August. The data do not go into detail about why specific industries suffered, but it is thought that a temporary hiatus in the pornography industry had a significant impact on the figures. The adult film business was brought to a standstill for 12 days in August, after one of its actors was found to have HIV. The jobs data do not drill down into such specific industries, but the wider movie business lost 22,000 paid jobs – around 6pc of its total workforce.

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 summary report provides statistics from the revised 2011 estimates for the employment of nearly 90,000 state and local governments in the United States. It shows statistics on the number of state and local government civilian employees and their gross payrolls for the month of March 2011. Statistics include government functions such as education, fire protection and police protection. Statistics are available for the nation and individual states.

This report provides statistics on revenues, expenditures, financial assets and membership information for public employee retirement systems. Statistics are shown for retirement systems at the national, state and local government level. This publication presents data on public pension systems based on information collected from the 2011 Annual Survey of Public Pensions: State- and Locally-Administered Defined Benefit Data.

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.