“Real gross domestic product increased by 2.2 percent in California in the second quarter of 2016, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis says Wednesday. That puts California in the second tier of states for GDP growth. Rival Texas saw its GDP actually drop, down 0.2 percent, the BEA says.”
Exports fell 1.8% from September, the largest drop since January, and imports rose 1.3% in October. The fall in exports included declining shipments of soybeans, corn and consumer goods while the import rise included stronger domestic demand for foreign-made pharmaceuticals, cellphones and capital goods.
The innovation slump is a key reason the American standards of living have stagnated since 2000. Indeed, absent a turnaround, that stagnation is likely to continue, deepening the malaise that has left the middle class so dissatisfied. . . Regulations have raised the bar for commercializing new ideas while directing a growing share of innovative effort toward goals with benefits, such as cleaner air, that don’t translate into gross domestic product. Meanwhile, a trend toward industry concentration may have made it harder for upstart innovators to gain a toehold.
Given a choice among about 20 issues, nearly nine in ten voters believe that Sacramento officials are not spending enough time on fixing roads, highways and bridges in California. Eight in ten voters believe state leaders should be working harder to encourage economic development to attract new businesses to California, and about three quarters of voters want to see more attention paid to addressing high housing costs
The EU gets 65 per cent of its renewable energy from biofuels – mainly wood – but it is failing to ensure this bioenergy comes from sustainable sources, and results in less emissions than burning fossil fuels. Its policies in some cases are leading to deforestation, biodiversity loss and putting more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than burning coal.
The Commerce Department on Tuesday reported that a key measure of business earnings—profits after tax without inventory valuation and capital consumption adjustments—rose 3.5% from the second quarter, its third straight quarterly increase. . . Tuesday’s report also showed that gross domestic product, a broad measure of the goods and services produced across the economy, expanded at an inflation- and seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.2% in the third quarter, the strongest growth in two years.
U.S. employers hired at a steady clip in November while the unemployment rate fell to the lowest level in nine years, signs of enduring labor-market growth that will likely leave Federal Reserve officials on track to raise interest rates later this month.
The Bay Area’s black population experienced a dramatic migration into outer suburban parts of the region over a 14-year span, the result of the rising cost of living in inner regions, according to a new report by the Oakland nonprofit Urban Habitat.
CalPERS has consistently undercollected from government workers and employers, instead counting on overly optimistic investment forecasts to help fund retirees’ pensions.
As the largest sector within the nation’s clean energy economy, energy efficiency accounts for about three out of every four American clean energy jobs. In total, these technologies support almost 1.9 million jobs across the country, and 889,050 of these workers spend the majority of their time supporting the energy efficiency portion of their business.2 Employers across the roughly 165,000 establishments that conduct energy efficiency work are optimistic about business growth, projecting a collective 13 percent employment growth rate over 2016—or an additional 245,000 jobs.
“Los Angeles County has added more than 475,000 jobs since the depths of the Great Recession, and it’s expected to gain another 334,200 jobs by 2020, according to a report released Thursday. But most of those jobs will be low-paying positions, the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. reported at the seventh annual Southern California Economic Summit . . . “We have 90,000 fewer manufacturing jobs than we did in 2007 and those were jobs that paid around $52,000 a year back then,” Cooper said. “We’ve added 90,000 additional food service jobs since 2007, but those are jobs that have an average annual wage of $20,000.””
We estimate rates of “absolute income mobility” – the fraction of children who earn more than their parents – by combining historical data from Census and CPS cross-sections with panel data for recent birth cohorts from de-identified tax records. Our approach overcomes the key data limitation that has hampered research on trends in intergenerational mobility: the lack of large panel datasets linking parents and children. We find that rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90%for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. The result that absolute mobility has fallen sharply over the past half century is robust to the choice of price deflator, the definition of income, and accounting for taxes and transfers. In counterfactual simulations, we find that increasing GDP growth rates alone cannot restore absolute mobility to the rates experienced by children born in the 1940s. In contrast, changing the distribution of growth across income groups to the more equal distribution experienced by the 1940 birth cohort would reverse more than 70% of the decline in mobility. These results imply that reviving the “American Dream” of high rates of absolute mobility would require economic growth that is spread more broadly across the income distribution.
Americans’ incomes and household spending advanced at a solid pace for the second straight month in October, suggesting consumers can support economic growth in the year’s final months.
Economic activity in the District continued to expand at a moderate pace during the reporting period of early October through mid-November. Overall price inflation was limited, while upward wage pressures increased further. Sales of retail goods continued to expand at a moderate pace, and growth in the consumer and business services sectors was solid. Manufacturing activity changed little on balance. Agricultural yields and sales grew further. Activity in the residential and commercial real estate sectors remained high. Lending activity expanded moderately.
Progressive politicians, dominant in California, talk incessantly about housing affordability, but blindly pursue policies that will make things even worse. It should not be surprising that the housing-cost adjusted poverty rate in California is the worst in union, underperforming even Mississippi. It should also not be surprising that Californians of every age group, including Millennials, are leaving state in larger numbers than they are being attracted.