News

Back-to-school shopping failed to boost the pace of consumer spending last month and retal sales growth unexpectedly slowed, the Commerce Department said Friday.

The economic recovery in the Bay Area and California is gaining steam, analysts said Thursday, yet the pace of job growth is being hampered by new technologies that enable employers to limit hiring. Economists with the closely watched UCLA Anderson Forecast say the Bay Area is leading the economic rebound in California, and that California is leading the nation. But the upswing is uneven. “This is a bifurcated recovery,” said Anderson Forecast senior economist Jerry Nickelsburg.

Economists at the UCLA Anderson Forecast said Thursday that the pace of job growth has slowed in the Golden State, raising fears that structural problems in the labor market will temper future employment gains. UCLA economists said in their quarterly forecast that a large proportion of California workers’ education and training is obsolete for jobs in technology and other industries that require “21st century” skills.

California’s economy is in for more of the steady, unspectacular growth the state has experienced the past few years, according to a new forecast. The latest UCLA Anderson Forecast, released today , says California can expected a continued fall in unemployment in the coming years, with the Sacramento region and the rest of the Central Valley still lagging the more prosperous coastal regions. Overall, the state continues to outperform the national economy, with job growth of 2.8 percent over the past 12 months, and the gap between the U.S. and California unemployment rates has been cut in half to 1.4 percent.

California lawmakers took a major step Thursday toward lowering the state’s high electricity prices—and set the stage for a big battle over incentives that have turned the state into the biggest market for residential-rooftop solar power. A bill passed by the legislature Thursday repeals a 2001 law, meant to encourage conservation, which requires the state’s investor-owned utilities to sell power at rates that rise sharply the more electricity a customer uses. The new legislation doesn’t say how prices should be set in the future, leaving that to regulators, utilities and public advocates to work out.

Southern California home prices stayed flat in August for the second straight month, an indication the market may be normalizing after a period of torrid price hikes.

Democratic Senate Leader Darrell Steinberg is shelving most of his effort to streamline the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, this year. The decision came late Wednesday night at the end of the second-to-last day of legislative session.

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.

Regional entrepreneurship ecosystems, aka startup communities, are being studied and touted as the next new thing in economic development for cities and metropolitan areas across the country—especially in the high-technology and information technology (ICT) sectors. And for good reason. According to a report by Ian Hathaway of Engine that looked closely at the dynamism of the high-tech and ICT sectors in the United States, particularly new and young companies, these are the firms that create jobs at the fastest pace and are important drivers of economic growth.

Our research finds little evidence of a meaningful and persistent skills gap in most parts of the U.S., including in its most important manufacturing zones. The real problem is that companies have become too passive in recruiting and developing skilled workers at a time when the U.S. education system has moved away from a focus on manufacturing skills in order to put greater emphasis on other capabilities. Over the long term, therefore, serious skills shortages could develop unless action is taken.

The five states with the highest average combined rates are Tennessee (9.44 percent), Arkansas (9.18 percent), Louisiana (8.89 percent), Washington (8.87 percent), and Oklahoma (8.72 percent). . . California, which raised its sales and income taxes through the initiative process in November of 2012, has the highest state-level rate at 7.5 percent.] Five states tie for the second-highest statewide rate with 7 percent each: Indiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Tennessee.

The California Film & Television Tax Credit Program (Program) was enacted in February 2009 as part of a targeted economic stimulus package to increase film and television production spending, jobs and tax revenues in California. The Program has just commenced its 5th fiscal year. This report will summarize the Program’s progress from its launch in July 2009 through June 2013, and includes spending estimates and project information for the current fiscal year (July 2013 – June 2014). The report also includes a brief overview of California’s entertainment industry and the growing competition for our state’s motion picture production spending, as well as supplementary background on the changing landscape for scripted television series production.

We project that the U.S., as a result of its increasing competitiveness in manufacturing, will capture $70 billion to $115 billion in annual exports from other nations by the end of the decade. About two-thirds of these export gains could come from production shifts to the U.S. from leading European nations and Japan. By 2020, higher U.S. exports, combined with production work that will likely be “reshored” from China, could create 2.5 million to 5 million American factory and service jobs associated with increased manufacturing.

California’s job market is experiencing a sustained increase in employment as the state continues to emerge from the Great Recession. However, even with unemployment falling, California’s job market recovery has not reached large segments of California’s workers. After more than three years of job growth, the pace of the recovery has been on par with that of previous recoveries in the state, which is bad news for California’s workers given the historic severity of job losses during the Great Recession. A majority of California counties still have unemployment rates in the double digits, and long-term unemployment remains a serious concern: More than two in five unemployed Californians have been searching for work for at least six months. And for those who do have work, this recovery has not yet produced the mix of jobs that would lead to broad-based economic growth. California’s recovery has disproportionately relied on low-wage service industries for job growth, and jobs generally have not returned in occupations that tend to pay wages in the middle of the earnings distribution. These weaknesses in the current recovery mean that challenges facing California even before the recession began, such as wage stagnation and widening inequality, continue today.

Unconventional oil and natural gas activity is reshaping America’s energy future and bringing significant benefits to the US economy in terms of jobs, government revenues, and GDP. This study provides the foundation for a dialogue focused on the still-evolving but transformative economic effects of this unconventional revolution.