Exports Linked to 14% of Jobs in Southland

Exports account for more than 850,000 jobs in the five-county Los Angeles region, far more than previously assumed, a new study disclosed Thursday.

An estimated 14% of the total employment in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties is directly or indirectly related to export manufacturing and services, well above the 10% share that has been the standard rule of thumb, according to the study by Cal State Long Beach.

“The bottom line is that we now know that trade, especially exports, is even more important to the regional economy than we thought previously,” said associate professor Lisa Grobar, the study’s author.

One of the largest employment categories, manufacturing, supported 200,000 local jobs directly, and an additional 400,000 indirectly. Tourism and service-related exports were also major sources of employment, with 253,000 jobs attributed to those sectors, the study found.

Grobar, who worked on the study last fall, said she pieced together the data from state and national reports from 1995, then used a variety of methods to determine how much employment in each sector could be linked to exports. She said that although she used the best available data and tried to employ the appropriate methodology for each industry sector, she believes her findings might still be conservative.

By country, Japan accounted for the most local export jobs--142,500--followed by Mexico, Canada and South Korea, each of which provided between 50,000 and 60,000 jobs, the study said.

However, Grobar warned that the data also underscore the region’s vulnerability to the Asian financial crisis, and raise the question of whether export businesses are flexible enough to redirect their efforts to other countries not affected by the problems.

Jack Kyser, chief economist at the Economic Development Corp. of Los Angeles County, said that hard numbers on export-related employment have been elusive because of the difficulty in collecting data.

For example, determining how many jobs are generated by exports sent through the region’s ports, airports and distribution facilities is a tricky task, he said.

Measuring the impact of trade on employment in the service sector has also been difficult, and it’s likely that the number of trade-related jobs in such fields as advertising and financial services are routinely undercounted, he said.

For that reason, the Cal State Long Beach study is “very ambitious,” Kyser said. But such research is important, he said, because “most people in Southern California don’t understand what international trade is. The data is frustrating, but it’s important to find something you can use to communicate to people that this is an important industry.”