LAEDC examines key industries in Los Angeles County to understand our regional strengths and weaknesses, and uses these insights to build more informed economic development strategies while comparing our performance against that of other regions. This report presents a description of our private sector economy through the lens of clusters and regional competitiveness.
With the rise of COVID-19 and its resulting impact on employment and wages in the county, this report should serve as a baseline of the pre-pandemic economy and its component clusters, which can inform more in-depth economic research and strategic planning in the future and during our recovery.

To prepare this report:

• We focused on the largest traded clusters and local clusters by employment, with the assumption that size matters.
• We broke those clusters down into their sub-clusters by employment, and showed employment patterns from 2007 to 2019 to gauge how the cluster has developed and how it responds to the business cycle.
• We determined the average wages paid in each cluster, and compared them to the average wage across all industries in L.A. County. We then examined the top performing industries in the cluster by average wages, to highlight the standouts of the county.
• We calculated the location quotient for each cluster to show
  regional concentration. Location quotient higher than 1.1 are concentrated in Los Angeles County vis-a-vis the nation, and a source of regional competitive advantage.

Click here to read the report.