Last Friday one of my colleagues and I attended a very interesting breakfast on the UC Irvine campus. The event was an update on some important indicators (economic, social, etc.) about Orange County. The speaker was Michael Ruane, the man responsible for getting this report done every year. Here is the link to the report and what follows is a couple of screen captures from the report with a little bit of analysis.

Best Places to Do Business

It is evident, from these charts at least, that Orange County is becoming a less business friendly location. Education is not the problem, we still rank in the top 30 of all counties. But job growth and our rank for the cost of doing business is fairly low and hurts our overall ranking. In 2005, we were in the top 30 overall for best places to do business but that ranking has only gotten worse each year since.

Employment by Industry

This chart shows where the jobs are in Orange County. Tourism, health, biomedical, computer software and defense have all grown over the period shown.

Home Affordability

One of the bright sides of the recession is that home prices have fallen enough to allow more people the ability to buy their own home.

High Tech Diversification

This chart is important because it shows that our high tech economy, which spurs a lot of the growth in the county, is very diverse. For example, if one of the sub-sectors suffers a hit we have a number of other sub-sectors in our local economy that can pick up the slack.

There is a lot of other great information in this study and it is well worth your time to read it.