SACRAMENTO – Bolstering the state’s efforts to grow international business opportunities for California’s companies, Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today established the California International Trade and Investment Advisory Council and appointed former U.S. Ambassador to Hungary Eleni Kounalakis as chair.
A planned expansion of the Panama Canal may be halted because of a dispute between the building consortium and canal authorities over $1.6 billion in extra costs.
For the month of November, the state’s merchandise export trade totaled $15.22 billion, a nominal 14.2% increase over the $13.33 billion in exports recorded in November 2012. By comparison, overall U.S. merchandise exports rose by 5.9% over the same period.
Cargo volume at the Port of Long Beach climbed 2.5 percent in November, compared to the same month last year, according to figures released Monday.
Traffic at the Port of Los Angeles increased 17 percent in November compared to the same month last year, according to figures released Monday.
A $1.47-billion proposal to add toll lanes to a traffic-clogged 14-mile stretch of the 405 Freeway from Long Beach to Costa Mesa has met with wide opposition from officials and residents in the six cities along the route. Civic leaders said they fear the plan could be a harbinger of more toll roads to come.
California’s 11 ports, from Humboldt Bay in the north to San Diego in the south, generate more than $40 billion in annual economic activity. They create hundreds of thousands of jobs dockside as well as inland where cargo is loaded onto trucks or trains for delivery across North America, mainly to Mid-West hubs like Chicago and St. Louis.
In October 2012, a city reeling from its recent bankruptcy filing saw a glimmer of hope in Amazon’s announcement that it had opened a distribution center and had hired 700 people.
California export trade figures for August, delayed 16 days due to the federal government shutdown, showed a significant late-summer surge.
Truckers at the Port of Oakland refused to work Monday to protest what they called unfair labor practices and unsafe working conditions.
SHANGHAI, CHINA – Positioning California to attract a growing share of China’s massive foreign investment pool and bolstering California-China trade, Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr., the Bay Area Council and the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz) today announced the hiring of Diane Long as the Executive Director of the new California-China Office of Trade and Investment.
The Foothill-Eastern Transportation Corridor Agency, which operates 39 miles (63 kilometers) of toll highways in Orange County, risks default on $2.4 billion in debt, a consultant to California Treasurer Bill Lockyer’s Debt and Investment Advisory Commission said in July. The county itself filed for protection in 1994, the biggest U.S. municipal bankruptcy at the time, after losing about $1.7 billion on derivatives.