Port spokesman Phillip Sanfield said the jump was in part due to an improving economy. He also said retailers appeared to be importing holiday season goods earlier this year to cover their bases should port labor negotiations fail and affect shipping.
But recent research shows that dynamism is slowing down. Business churning and new firm formations have been on a persistent decline during the last few decades, and the pace of net job creation has been subdued. This decline has been documented across a broad range of sectors in the U.S. economy, even in high-tech.
In-state businesses shipped merchandise valued at $15.43 billion in March, up a robust 9.6 percent from $14.07 billion in March 2013, according to an analysis of Tuesday’s U.S. Commerce Department figures by Beacon Economics, a consulting firm with offices in the Bay Area and Los Angeles.
There were 25,198 units of housing permitted in Los Angeles and Orange Counties, according to figures out Thursday from the Census Bureau. That’s up from about 17,500 in 2012 and triple the amount seen at the bottom of the housing market in 2009. But it’s still behind the 30,000-plus pace seen in the housing heyday of the mid-2000s.
California has the nation’s highest rate of poverty — nearly a quarter of its 38 million residents — under an alternative calculation devised by the Census Bureau that takes the cost of living into account.
Last year’s overall population growth, driven largely by the state’s having many more births than deaths, continued the slow pattern of the last decade. Immigration from other states and countries, once the major driver of growth, has dropped to near-zero.
The U.S. economy slowed in the first quarter to one of the weakest paces of the five-year recovery as the frigid winter appeared to curtailed business investment and weakness overseas hurt exports.
Today, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis released real, price-adjusted estimates of personal income for states and metropolitan areas for 2008-2012.
While the people who decide where to make movies uniformly say that they’d prefer to work in their hometown, better subsidies that other states and countries offer has made that almost impossible to justify.
For the month of February, the state’s merchandise export trade totaled $13.76 billion, up from the $12.70 billion in exports recorded in February 2013. By comparison, overall U.S. merchandise exports increased by just 0.3% during the same period.
Personal income increased $47.7 billion, or 0.3 percent, and disposable personal income (DPI) increased $42.3 billion, or 0.3 percent, in February, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) increased $30.8 billion, or 0.3 percent.
More than 517,000 containers moved through the port in February. Imports were down 2.7 percent, but exports increased 2.1 percent, compared to the same period last year. The number of empty containers sent overseas to be filled with goods dropped 8.3 percent.
Since the Great Recession began in late 2007, that path has narrowed because many of the next-tier jobs no longer exist. That means more lower-wage workers have to stay put. The resulting bottleneck is helping widen a gap between the richest Americans and everyone else.
The decisions made in all of the areas discussed in this analysis could result in changes to the six states’ demographics and economy, both initially and over time. For example, differing policies could result in migration or different settlement patterns initially. Over the longer term, the states’ economic development and other policies could alter their respective economies. The exact nature of these changes, both initially and over time, is unknown.
Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an annual rate of 2.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013 (that is, from the third quarter to the fourth quarter), according to the “second” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the third quarter, real GDP increased 4.1 percent.