2024 Southern California Economic Update Recap
SCAG’s December Regional Council meeting included a presentation of the “2024 Southern California Economic Update,” featuring SCAG’s annual economic reporting, presentations from SCAG’s Economic Roundtable, and in-depth discussion about the state of the economy among Regional Council members.
The “2024 Southern California Economic Update” details the state of the region’s economy over the past year and forecasts expected economic trends for the coming year.
Among the report’s biggest takeaways: the Southern California economy has generally kept pace with the economic growth of the rest of the country and state, but Southern California job growth was not spread evenly over the region’s economic sectors. A summary of the report is available on SCAG News.
Looking ahead to 2025, the strengths of the economy in 2024—logistics, large-scale transportation, healthcare, energy projects, and tourism—should continue into 2025.
SCAG Regional Council President and San Bernardino County Supervisor Curt Hagman delivered the opening remarks to the presentation. Kate Gordon, chief executive officer of California Forward, moderated a discussion with members of the SCAG Economic Roundtable after they presented reports on the overall regional economy and each of SCAG’s six counties:
- Mark Schniepp, director of California Economic Forecast, presented the overall regional outlook and the Ventura County report.
- Michael Bracken, managing partner and chief economist of Development Management Group, Inc., presented the Imperial County report.
- Shannon Sedgwick, director of the Institute for Applied Economics at the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation, presented the Los Angeles County report.
- Wallace Walrod, chief economic adviser of the Orange County Business Council, presented the Orange County report.
- Manfred Keil, chief economist of the Inland Empire Economic Partnership and Claremont McKenna College, delivered the report for Riverside and San Bernardino counties.
In addition, David Roland-Holst, managing director of Berkeley Economic Advising and Research, gave a presentation on regional sustainability, and Beth Tamayose, research director at the University of California, Riverside, School of Public Policy, gave a presentation on economic equity. A round of questions from members of the Regional Council followed the presentations.
Resources from the event are now available on the SCAG website:
SCAG continues to implement the Connect SoCal 2024 Regional Transportation Plan/Sustainable Communities Plan and looks forward to continuing the conversation at our next event. Please mark your calendars for the upcoming 2025 Regional Conference & General Assembly on May 1-2, 2025, in Palm Desert.
