Regional Economy and Governance

The Bay Area economy has been the envy of the world for fifty years running. Our business leaders have revolutionized industries from semiconductors to personal computers to the internet to social media and in healthcare, biotechnology, environmental science and many other fields. Today’s challenge is to preserve the growth and resilience of our economy and to share our prosperity more broadly, particularly through the creation of more middle wage jobs. In order to ensure the Bay Area’s economic vitality and resilience despite increasing boom and bust cycles, public and private sector leaders must come together around pragmatic solutions to persistent issues and barriers to success.

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Co-Ownership in California

California's housing market is facing an intractable challenge. The combination of high demand—particularly in the state’s coastal economic hubs—and limited housing inventory has created an untenable situation for would-be homebuyers. Median home values in many California markets are well above $1 million, and housing costs across the state are much higher than national averages.
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California Assembly Select Committee on Permitting Reform

The Final Report from the Assembly Select Committee on Permitting Reform, chaired by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), examines systemic permitting challenges that slow critical housing and climate infrastructure projects in California. Based on a year of research, public hearings, site visits, and input from over 100 stakeholder organizations, the report identifies key barriers, highlights best practices, and outlines opportunities for reform to reduce uncertainty, streamline approvals, and lower costs. The findings underscore how California’s current permitting system drives delays and increased expenses, hindering efforts to address the state’s urgent housing and climate needs.
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Democratize AI: How the AI Tide Can Lift More Boats

February 25, 2024 AI is fueling economic recovery in the Bay Area. Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s open-source R1 model has raised concerns about AI investment, but its energy-efficient and low-cost innovations could accelerate AI adoption. …

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Reading the Trump Playbook: The Global Economy Waits

November 11, 2024 The Trump presidency will reshape the United States relationship with the rest of the world. Changes from the current administration will be abrupt, with a long list of campaign promises revolving around …

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Evaluating the Case for the East Solano Plan

The East Solano Plan seeks to create a new, mixed-use community at the heart of the Northern California Megaregion with homes, businesses, and civic uses organized into medium-density neighborhoods. At full build out, the plan has room for 400,000 people. The plan includes a commitment to bring 15,000 jobs to Solano County in the first phase of development, along with $500 million in community benefits such as downpayment assistance for Solano County residents and a $200 million fund to invest in revitalizing existing downtowns throughout Solano County. At full build out, these numbers increase to $4 billion in community benefits and $800 million for Solano County downtowns.
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Bay Area Transit and Traffic Monthly Tracker

Explore the traffic tracker here. Each month, the Bay Area Council Economic Institute compiles data from the region’s 7 state-owned toll bridges, as well as ridership data from AC Transit, BART, Caltrain, Golden Gate Ferry, …

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Harnessing the Private Sector

Without intervention, wildfires will continue to threaten homes, create economic costs, and jeopardize the health of the state’s residents. A variety of Federal, State and local programs, grants, and initiatives are advancing, however public-sector programs alone are unlikely to ever reach the scale necessary to completely mitigate the threat. It is therefore essential to co-develop programs and initiatives to leverage the resources within the private sector.
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Policy Brief: Enhancing Multilingual Learning Programs in California

Multilingual Learning Programs hold immense potential to transform California’s education system and prepare student to thrive in an increasingly connected world. By addressing the current challenges and implementing the suggested policy recommendations, California can create a robust framework for MLL programs that will benefit students, teachers, businesses, families, and communities, while fostering a more inclusive, diverse, and prosperous state.
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Business Taxes in the Bay Area

To investigate the business tax landscape across the Bay Area, the Institute analyzed the 20 largest job centers across the southern five counties (Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara). The analysis that follows summarizes business tax structures and rates across the region using three hypothetical companies.
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Sea Level Rise

Much of the detailed planning for how to address these challenges is taking place at the regional and local level. The state supports those efforts by encouraging regional-scale collaboration, supporting local planning and adaptation projects, providing data and analysis, and enhancing public awareness of sea level rise risks and impacts.7 Much of this occurs through the Ocean Protection Council (OPC), a high-level state government panel created in part to protect ocean health in the face of climate change. Based on evolving scientific knowledge, the OPC develops state-level approaches that respond to the anticipated impacts of storms, erosion and sea level rise on coastal communities.
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Innovation Platform

From this high-level review, it appears that despite some attrition in corporate innovation offices the global innovation presence remains strong.
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Optimizing Land Uses Near Transit Stations

There have been numerous studies bolstering the case for residential development near transit stations. Less understood, however, are the benefits of commercial development near transit and what increased office and retail space along key transit corridors could mean for the Bay Area’s transit system, regional labor force, and economy more broadly.
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The Future of Advanced Technology and Basic Research

California is globally recognized as the world’s leading center for technology, innovation, and entrepreneurial opportunity. While most concentrated in the San Francisco and Silicon Valley Bay Area, technology assets are spread throughout the state. The economic strength that flows from this unique capacity has produced high-value jobs and world-leading companies and puts California at the leading edge of current and emerging technologies that will transform the world’s economy in coming decades. The income that this activity generates is also a critical source of revenue for the state through personal income taxes (PIT) due to the substantial workforce dedicated to advancing technology in California. In the state’s 2019-2020 fiscal year, PIT accounted for 66.19 percent of California’s General Fund revenues, much of which are driven by taxation on technology initial public offerings (IPOs) and stock gains.
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An Analysis of Oakland’s Proposed Business Tax Increase

The increased business tax will eliminate jobs today and into the future, harm a range of large and small employers, choke off future city revenues and development, and make the city’s budget highly reliant on a few employers that can easily relocate elsewhere. The city’s economy is currently in need of policies that will drive a faster recovery in employment. The proposed increase in the business tax will only do the opposite, and it will be detrimental to the city’s ability to attract and retain jobs for Oaklanders well into the future.
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The True Cost of Wildfires

Wildfires are now an annual concern for many of the state’s residents, particularly in and around the Bay Area. Households in fire-prone areas plan for defensible space and exit strategies in the case of a wildfire, and even those in urban areas prepare for the potential of smoke-laden skies and the health impacts they bring. Now, each wildfire season seems to bring weeks of deadly and dangerous air quality, along with destroyed businesses, homes, neighborhoods, and livelihoods.
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Paid Family Leave in California

As the longest standing PFL program in the nation, the California PFL program provides a unique view into the impacts and effectiveness of PFL legislation. As such, there is a growing body of research examining the first two decades of the program, including the Bay Area Council Economic Institute’s previous report focused on California’s program. Published prior to the most recent expansion of the program, that report presents data on program usage and impacts of the program on California businesses. The research found that take up rates were growing, the program increased employment among new mothers, and the impact to businesses was positive.
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Bay Area Economic Profile 2020

The report includes chapters focused on housing and transportation, venture capital and innovation, income inequality, higher education, regional migration, globalization trends, and labor force participation. The chapters provide data points that offer early insights into how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted different aspects of the region and economy in 2020 to help the region plan for a strong and equitable economic recovery.
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Bay Area Homelessness

The Bay Area’s homelessness crisis was created by policy failures at all levels of government; interventions at all levels of government are needed to solve it. Rather than pursuing a shelter mandate, the Bay Area should use existing but unused tools at its disposal to raise $10 billion in new regional revenue to expand its inventory of emergency shelters and permanent housing. The region should pair this investment with new additional state and federal support for affordable housing and homelessness prevention, especially via proven programs like Project Homekey and Section 8. These investments should be paired with state policy reforms to boost housing production and reduce pressure on low-income renters, and to reduce local powers to halt shelter production. Although the Bay Area is a wealthy region, it cannot solve homelessness by itself.
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New Transbay Rail Crossing: Making the Case for a Key Megaregional Connection

This report explains interconnected nature of the economy in Northern California Megaregion and examines the economic potential that a more efficient rail transit system could bring to the megaregion. The report examines how unlocking the transbay bottleneck with a new transbay rail crossing is an integral investment in building a connected rail network in the Northern California Megaregion and how that network would transform rail travel across the 21-county megaregion. 
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Economic Profile 2020: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Regional Labor Force

This is a chapter of the Economic Profile, the eleventh in a series of Bay Area Economic Profile reports produced since 1997 by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute in partnership with McKinsey & Company. This chapter focuses on COVID-19’s effects on regional labor force participation.
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Economic Profile 2020: The Evolution of the Bay Area Higher Education System in the Wake of COVID-19

This is a chapter of the Economic Profile, the eleventh in a series of Bay Area Economic Profile reports produced since 1997 by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute in partnership with McKinsey & Company. This chapter focuses on COVID-19’s effects on the higher education system.
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Economic Profile 2020: Housing and Transportation in a Post-Pandemic Bay Area

This is a chapter of the Economic Profile, the eleventh in a series of Bay Area Economic Profile reports produced since 1997 by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute in partnership with McKinsey & Company. This chapter focuses on COVID-19’s effects on travel patterns and housing costs.
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Economic Profile 2020: The Future of the Bay Area’s Innovation Ecosystem

This is a chapter of the Economic Profile, the eleventh in a series of Bay Area Economic Profile reports produced since 1997 by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute in partnership with McKinsey & Company. This chapter explores how COVID-19 has shaped the technology industry, venture capital, and innovation within the Bay Area, providing insights into the future of technology in the region.
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Economic Profile 2020: Bay Area Economic Recovery Tracker

This is a chapter of the Economic Profile, the eleventh in a series of Bay Area Economic Profile reports produced since 1997 by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute in partnership with McKinsey & Company. In an effort to understand the health of the Bay Area economy throughout the COVID-19 recession, this page will track regional recovery and provide monthly updates using data from the California Employment Development Department and Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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Continuing Growth and Unparalleled Innovation

This report, the tenth in a series of Bay Area Economic Profile reports produced since 1997 by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute and McKinsey & Company, examines the region’s economy over the last decade, as it has emerged from the Great Recession to enter a new period of immense growth and innovation. As previous reports have done, it benchmarks the Bay Area’s performance against other knowledge-based economies to assess the region’s national and global competitiveness. It also examines the economic and policy challenges that continue to confront the region, even in a period of extraordinary growth, and looks to uncover the next wave of innovation and renewal.
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Economic Development in the Bay Area

Regional agency planning functions in the Bay Area span the areas of transportation, land use, and the environment; however, there is no entity or official capacity that takes economic development into account for the entire region...
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The Real Impact of Trade Agreements

Recent political debate and the anxiety it has fueled have created an unfortunate—and inaccurate—impression that trade agreements are destroying manufacturing and killing US jobs. A look at the facts reveals a more complex story and points to a different conclusion.
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How will ‘Brexit’ Impact the Bay Area?

Institute Senior Director Sean Randolph offers initial analysis of the historic vote in Britain to exit the European Union and its impact on the Bay Area economically. The full implications of Britain’s decision to leave …

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Promise and Perils of an Accelerated Economy

This report, the ninth in a series of Bay Area Economic Profile reports produced since 1997 by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute and McKinsey & Company, examines the region’s economy as it has emerged from the Great Recession to enter a new period of growth and innovation.
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Micah Weinberg on Inside Silicon Valley with Russell Hancock

On Monday January 18, 2016, Institute President Micah Weinberg appeared as a guest speaker on Inside Silicon Valley, a radio program presented by Joint Venture Silicon Valley hosted by Russell Hancock. During the program — which …

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A Roadmap for Economic Resilience

The purpose of the Regional Economic Strategy's Roadmap for Economic Resilience is to offer concrete actions for growing regional prosperity and a flexible framework for developing actions going forward. Its proposals are evergreen agents of economic resilience, strategies wise in both expansion and downtown, necessary to accelerate the former and dampen the latter. It is a recipe for a robust and enduring regional economy.
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The 1099 Economy — Elusive, but Diverse and Growing

The recent growth of the segment of the labor force made up of contract workers — sometimes known as freelancers, gig-workers, supertemps, or 1099 workers (“1099” refers to the IRS Form 1099-MISC used by independent contractors) — was initially described as a tidal wave.
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Trade in the Bay Area

Made for Trade

The revenues of Bay Area companies increasingly come from global markets, and the Bay Area economy is intricately linked with global trade and financial flows. The Bay Area is on the cutting edge of technology, innovation and finance, handling $25 billion in exports in 2013. As technology continues to increase as a percentage of global trade, the Bay Area is well positioned to export to expanding future and emerging markets, especially in Asia. A report commissioned by HSBC in 2014 looks at international trade activity in the Bay Area, with a particular focus on technology, China, and the internationalization of China’s currency.

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A Regional Economic Assessment

This 2012 report was prepared at the request of the Joint Policy Committee of regional government agencies and leaders in the Bay Area’s business community. The analysis was framed with two principal objectives: to comprehensively assess what is driving the regional economy from the perspective of competitiveness, growth, and jobs, and to identify impediments to stronger growth and job creation.
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