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The company would be based in St. Louis. That would make Health Net the latest of several companies whose corporate headquarters have left Southern California.

The latest figures for 2014 from the World Bank show that Brazil claimed seventh place with a gross domestic product of $2.346 trillion. California’s gross state product, which is comparable to GDP, was $2.312 trillion, according to a report released last month by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

About 60% of the 103,117 California applicants were offered a spot on at least one of UC’s nine undergraduate campuses, according to university figures released Thursday. That appears to be a record low acceptance rate, down from about 63% of the 99,955 applicants last year, and about 79% in 1999, the oldest available systemwide figures.

Wages for the typical worker in California — those who earn $19.18 an hour, or about $39,800 a year — are still 1.8% lower than they were in 2011, when the state’s unemployment rate hovered around 11.5%. The current unemployment rate is 6.4%

After years of neglect, state officials estimate it will cost $59 billion to fix the now-crumbling roads and freeways that Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown championed more than five decades ago. And it’s up to his son, Gov. Jerry Brown, to find the money.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the construction industry added jobs at the quickest pace over the past year, at 6.9%, followed by professional and business services at 5.1% and leisure and hospitality at 3.8%. The state’s slowest-growing industries over the past year were manufacturing, which grew jobs at a rate of 0.4%, and financial services, at 1%.

That effort, resisted by environmentalists and powerful labor unions, sputtered out two years ago. Since then, Brown and Democratic lawmakers have instead struck deals giving special consideration to certain projects rather than confront the political difficulties of overhauling the law. . . Because the arrangements are tied to the budget, they are not subject to the lengthy public review process required of most proposals in the Capitol.

Fed officials sharply downgraded their economic forecast for this year. They projected the economy would grow between 1.8% and 2% this year, well below the range of 2.3% to 2.7% in its last forecast in March.

Brown approved a streamlined environmental review for the 8150 Sunset Blvd. project in Hollywood in April 2014 and the same expedited process for the Warriors project in Mission Bay three months ago.

Prompted by complaints like Hill’s, the California state auditor last year began evaluating how the state oversees much of its health program for low-income residents. The resulting audit released Tuesday found that provider directories were riddled with errors and that the state Department of Health Care Services hadn’t properly regulated plans to guarantee patients adequate access to doctors.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl said Monday that she intends to propose a minimum wage increase for county workers and businesses in unincorporated areas that mirrors the plan recently approved by the city of Los Angeles.

But for some partisans on each side of the debate, that historic moment has been tainted by labor leaders’ last-minute push for an exemption for unionized workplaces. The request for a union waiver — proposed and then abruptly shelved — drew national attention, much of it negative, to the county Federation of Labor and its recently installed top executive, Rusty Hicks.

Even as the state struggles through an epic water crisis, Gov. Jerry Brown assured residents Tuesday that technology, adaptation and “a more elegant” way of living would ultimately preserve the California dream for generations to come.

Two Democratic state senators plan to introduce legislation Wednesday to overhaul Proposition 13, the state’s landmark restrictions on property taxes, so local governments can raise more revenue from commercial and industrial properties.

But the question is whether California has done enough to guard against another budget crisis, and experts say that the answer is a resounding no.