A recently released study by the Milken Institute posits Los Angeles and other Southern California cities as among the continent's leading high-tech centers -- at least as of 2007, the year from which the report's data was culled.
"North America’s High-Tech Economy: The Geography of Knowledge-Based Industries," written by Ross C. DeVol, Kevin Klowden, Armen Bedroussian and Benjamin Yeo, celebrates Northern California's Silicon Valley as the runaway winner for the top tech spot.
While the San Jose / Sunnyvale / Santa Clara region received a perfect "100" score on Milken's scale, the next four-hightest ranked metropolitian areas scored in the mid-to-low 40s. That group ends with Los Angeles / Long Beach / Glendale in the fifth place, overall, slot.
(The Seattle area placed second, the Boston area third, and the Washington, D.C. region, fourth, overall.)
San Diego and Orange County regions came in seventh and eighth, and San Francisco, tenth. (All had scores in the teens.) That meant that half of the top ten slots were filled by California burghs.
Why does all this matter? From the study's executive summary:
"Cities with strong high-tech bases will perform best as the economy recovers because the jobs generated by these fields pay so well. That’s why so many regions have worked tirelessly – with tax breaks and other incentives – to attract high-tech industries, whether computer manufacturing, medical devices development or life sciences research."
Click here for a chart of the top 25 and a map. Login and password may be required. A .PDF of the complete report may be downloaded, or a print copy purchased, here.
Photo Credit: The image accompanying this post was taken by Flickr user half alive. It was used under Creative Commons license.
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I am too old to learn new high tech skills so I guess it will be off to McDonald's for me when (if) the economy rebounds. Do you want that supersized, or regular, sir?
I guess while my health is good they can always put me to work on the some kind "green" or eco-friendly energy job - putting up solar panels in the desert!
You could always take up blogging ;)
The report should not imply that if you do not possess adequate technical skills you are doomed to chronic unemployment. On the contrary, cities with impressive high-tech regions like Los Angeles and San Jose will see their general economy boom--not just those niches working in and with computers--when the nation begins to rise out of the current crisis, to the benefit of the entire populace. Hope remains!
What role do tax rates play in the development of high-tech zones? One article certainly ain't a think tank study, but here's a recent piece from LAT:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-biztax20-2009jun20,0,1495736.story