Recession Seen for County, State

The business disruptions created by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have brought Los Angeles County and the state to the brink of a mild recession, a local economic forecaster said Monday.

Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., said the county and the state are likely to shed jobs through the end of the year. His comments reflected a downward revision of a forecast he issued just two months ago.

Still, Kyser predicted that the anticipated downturn will be far less dramatic than the one that devastated the California economy in the early 1990s.

“Some sectors will feel only glancing blows, but others, like travel and tourism and related sectors, will suffer,” Kyser said.

Kyser said Los Angeles and California are likely to stabilize by early next year. As a result, he acknowledged, the downturn in the county and the state might not qualify as recessions, which commonly are defined as two quarters of shrinking economic output.

His outlook for California was in line with forecasts by business analysts at UCLA, who said before the attacks that the state was in recession-like territory.