Real gross domestic product — the value of the production of goods and services in the United States, adjusted for price changes — increased at an annual rate of 2.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2014, according to the “advance” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the third quarter, real GDP increased 5.0 percent.
U.S. economic growth retreated to a modest pace in the final months of 2014, underscoring obstacles facing the recovery as troubles mount abroad.
Given the diminished possibilities of buying a home or finding a decent job in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, Latinos have been flocking to the suburban periphery that encompasses much of adjacent Riverside and San Bernardino counties, also known as the Inland Empire, which ranks second in our survey. From 2000 through 2013, the Latino population in the area soared 74%, compared to a 15% population gain for Los Angeles.
Income inequality sharply increased in California as the state emerged from the Great Recession, with the top 1 percent of Californians capturing 135 percent of income growth between 2009 and 2012, according to a new national analysis.
California state workers’ salaries rose a total $1.1 billion last year, according to new payroll data, while the number of state employees also grew.
Based on average pre-tax income earned by the third quintile, or the middle 20% of earners in each state, middle class incomes in California declined the most in the country. Incomes among middle class Californian households fell by nearly 7% between 2009 and 2013, while income among the state’s fifth quintile, or the top 20% of state earners, grew by 1.3%.
A study by the National Retail Federation and the National Association of Manufacturers estimates that a 10-day shutdown would cost the nation’s economy nearly $2 billion a day and “could be catastrophic” for retailers, manufacturers, farmers and other industries across the economy that rely on the ports for both imports and exports.
The income gap between African Americans and whites in California has reached its widest point in decades, a trend that reflects a broader, growing chasm between the state’s wealthy and poor, experts said.
U.S. consumers are seeing prices rise at the slowest annual pace in more than five years, largely thanks to a global plunge in oil prices, presenting a potential complication for the Federal Reserve as it looks to raise interest rates this year.
California is overtaking Brazil as the world’s seventh-largest economy, bolstered by rising employment, home values and personal and corporate income, a year after the most-populous state surpassed Russia and Italy.
In reality, however, California’s path back remains slow and treacherous. California Lutheran University economist Bill Watkins, like other economists, is somewhat bullish on the state’s short-run situation, but suggests that the highly unequal recovery, particularly for the middle class, could prove problematic over time.
Its official poverty rate was roughly in line with the nation as a whole, but the Census Bureau’s alternative measure, which took into account all forms of income and the cost of living, found nearly a quarter of Californians to be impoverished, by far the highest rate of any state.
Since the Great Recession, the Texas model – built around lower taxes, less-stringent regulation and pro-business politics – has been the clearly ascendant of the two, with growth seen along a broad array of industries, including construction, manufacturing and technology, as well as energy. This economic diversity helped the state emerge from the recession far earlier than the rest of the country, recovering its 2007 jobs level by 2011. (California barely crawled into positive territory on jobs this past year.) Texas contributed 23 percent of U.S. economic growth in 2012 and 22 percent in 2011. Without Texas’ growth in this decade, the country could well still be in recession. . . California’s “boom” has come later in the cycle than Texas’, and is far more narrowly based, depending largely on the social media bubble, stock gains among its many wealthy residents and a surge in prices of high-end, coastal real estate. From October 2007 to October 2014, California gained a net 162,000 jobs; Texas in the same period added more than 1.2 million. Surprisingly, notes economist Dan Hamilton, the California tech industry has added barely 10,000 net jobs since 2007.
Despite considerable improvement in the labor market, growth in wages continues to be disappointing. One reason is that many firms were unable to reduce wages during the recession, and they must now work off a stockpile of pent-up wage cuts. This pattern is evident nationwide and explains the variation in wage growth across industries. Industries that were least able to cut wages during the downturn and therefore accrued the most pent-up cuts have experienced relatively slower wage growth during the recovery.
The past thirty years have seen a dramatic decline in the rate of income convergence across states and in population flows to wealthy places. These changes coincide with (1) an increase in housing prices in productive areas, (2) a divergence in the skill-specific returns to living in those places, and (3) a redirection of unskilled migration away from productive places. . . Income convergence continues in less-regulated places, while it has mostly stopped in places with more regulation.
