The CMC-UCLA Inland Empire Forecast Conference at Citizens Business Bank Arena in Ontario featured expert discussions that provided a dose of positive insight into jobs, employment and economic activity for the region’s coming year.
Hosted on Oct. 9 by the Claremont McKenna College Inland Empire Center for Economics & Public Policy and the UCLA Anderson Forecast, the 4th Annual Inland Empire Economic Forecast Conference provided short-term and long-term projections of where the national, state, and local economies are headed.
According to Manfred W. Keil, former Chair of the Robert Day School of Economics and Finance at Claremont McKenna College, most of the news remained positive for the region. While the Inland Empire experienced horrendous job losses in construction and manufacturing – and to a lesser extent recently from the government sector – there are many positive signs, Keil wrote in his summary for the CMC-UCLA Forecast Book.
“The Logistics sector has benefited from the continued solid, if unspectacular, state and national recovery,” Keil stated. “And the housing sector finally has shown signs of recovery from depression-type levels. Both prices and sales have improved recently, although housing starts and permits have not followed this positive trend yet.”
Keil said he projects GDP to grow by 2 percent in 2013 for the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario Metropolitan Statistical Area. “Growth will then pick up in 2014, and we expect to see numbers closer to 3 percent for both 2014 and 2015,” he said.
According to Keil, unemployment rates have seen substantial improvement recently. These have come down from an annual (average) high of 14.4 percent in 2010 to 9.9 percent in August
2013 (seasonally adjusted), he wrote.
“The gap between local, state, and national unemployment rates is closing,” Keil stated. “Our forecast for the Inland Empire unemployment rate shows continued improvements until 2015 under various scenarios.”
However, he said that employment levels clearly have not recovered to prerecession levels almost four years into the expansion and will not reach these lows by the end of our forecast period.
David Shulman, Senior Economist for the UCLA Anderson Forecast, agreed in his analysis, ‘Return to Normalcy, Sort of,’ that the region will experience “a resumption of normal growth on the order of 3 percent a year in 2014 and 2015, far better than the 2 percent growth we have been used to since the recession ended in 2009.”
Shulman said he also believed that the era of very low interest rates will soon be behind us.
“The recent dramatic rise in bond yields in all likelihood rang the bell,” he wrote. “But make no mistake, as good as a resumption of normal growth is, it still will not be enough to restore the economy back to its pre-recession growth path.”
For more information on the Claremont McKenna College Inland Empire Center for Economics and Public Policy, visit http://www.inlandempirecenter.org. And more information on the UCLA Anderson Forecast, can be found at http://www.uclaforecast.com.
