Although the report was clearly positive and helped lift stocks, economists at the moment see GDP growth in the last three months of the year coming in at less than 3%. And some special factors in the third-quarter report explain why.
Kolko’s theory isn’t an outlier. There is a deep literature tying liberal residents to illiberal housing policies that create affordability crunches for the middle class. In 2010, UCLA economist Matthew Kahn published a study of California cities, which found that liberal metros issued fewer new housing permits. The correlation held over time: As California cities became more liberal, he said, they built fewer homes.
Business economists reported solid but slowing growth at their companies over the summer as gauges of sales, hiring and profit margins fell slightly from the second quarter, according to survey results released Monday..
As brutal as the Central Valley economy has fared over the last several years, it’s starting to bounce back.
Nearly a quarter of the state’s 38 million residents (8.9 million) live in poverty, a new Census Bureau report says, a level virtually unchanged since the agency first began reporting on the method’s effects.
Economic activity in the Twelfth District continued to improve moderately during the reporting period of mid-August through late September. Overall price and wage inflation remained modest. Retail sales grew slightly, and demand for business and consumer services increased moderately. Overall manufacturing activity picked up, while agricultural conditions were mixed. Real estate activity advanced, but growth in the residential sector varied across the District. Loan demand increased moderately.
Los Angeles has long been the center of technology and innovation, with the nexus of its signature aerospace and entertainment industries inexorably shattering successive frontiers of knowledge and imagination.
While progress in the national and state economies has boosted confidence, optimism on the part of both consumers and businesses has been tempered by caution. Following a 3.0% increase in 2013, nonfarm jobs are expected to increase by 2.2% in both 2014 and in 2015. The unemployment rate will fall from 8.9% in 2013 to 7.5% this year and 7.0% in 2015. With continued improvement in the labor market, both personal income and total taxable sales should increase by four to five percent in each of the next two years.
Better data from actual payroll records that the government collects as part of the unemployment insurance program suggest the average hotel worker is making almost 20% more than they are self reporting in the ACS data. And of course this fails to include the healthy tip income that many workers in the hospitality space earn, including waiters, valets, bellhops, and bartenders. In other words, clearly there are some low-income workers in the hotel field, but not nearly as many as the initial estimates the researchers would have you believe.
According to an analysis by Standard & Poor’s, as the income gap has widened over the years, growth in state tax revenue has declined, from 11 percent annually from 1950 to 1979 — before the income gap began to noticeably widen — to 7 percent since 2009. Bottom line, according to the report, “increasing income inequality is undermining the rate of state revenue growth” in California and nationwide.
Though the region’s $94,572 median income is about 43 percent higher than the typical U.S. household, that eye-popping figure is skewed by a widening gap between high and low earners.
Exports of California food products took a dive in August, with fruit and tree nuts decreasing by 8 percent when compared to the same time last year and vegetables dropping by 7.8 percent, according to data released Friday by Beacon Economics.
Of the nation’s 52 largest metropolitan statistical areas, many of the top performers have strong tech economies, led by the No. 2 metro area on our list, San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, aka Silicon Valley, where real per capita GDP expanded 11.5% from 2010-13. Perhaps more surprising is the strong, tech-fuelled performance of No. 3 Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, Ore., where real per capita GDP grew 9.2%. The prime contributor has been the robust performance of late of Intel, the state’s largest private employer, which employs about 17,000 in Portland’s western suburbs around the town of Hillsboro, the company’s largest concentration of workers anywhere. . . Per capita growth in the energy states has been even more impressive. Placing first on our big cities list is Houston-the Woodlands-Sugarland, Texas, where per capita GDP rose 13.2% from 2010-13, a major achievement in a region whose population continues to grow rapidly. Zooming out to all 381 U.S. MSAs, no places come close to the two Texas oil towns that rank first and second overall, Midland (sizzling 38.8% growth since 2010) and Odessa (34.1%).
Los Angeles became the latest to join the movement when the city council approved a law on Sept. 24 requiring large hotels to pay employees at least $15.37 per hour and provide generous paid sick-leave benefits. But the ordinance includes a provision, increasingly common in similar ordinances, that permits unions to waive the requirements in collective bargaining.
. . . In 2013 the Long Beach Business Journal cited the collective-bargaining waiver built into the city’s $13 minimum wage law as an important factor in the unionization of two large hotels, the Hyatt Regency Long Beach and the Hyatt Pike Long Beach.
A drive to raise Los Angeles’s minimum wage to nearly twice the federal level would turn the country’s second-largest city into a prime test for whether high pay requirements help lift workers out of poverty or increase joblessness and blunt economic growth.