Report: Trade volumes, port congestion, jobs all up in 2007

Report: Trade volumes, port congestion, jobs all up in 2007 Trade volumes will set new records this year, port congestion on the roadways will worsen, the Southern California region will see the creation of roughly 30,000 new trade-related jobs and the High Desert will prove an attraction to distribution companies seeking land, according to a May 1 trade report and its author.
   Containers handled at the neighboring ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach will increase 9.2 percent, ending the year with 17.2 million TEUs handled by the two ports, according to report author Jack Kyser, chief economist of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. Together, Los Angeles and Long Beach comprise the busiest container port complex in the Western Hemisphere.
   According to the LAEDC report, international trade activity in Southern California is headed toward record levels this year, despite a general slowdown in the U.S. economy.
   Trade in the five counties of Southern California — Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino — added 35,000 jobs in 2006, the report said. And, despite the fragmentation of the trade industry about 30,000 new positions will be added to the rolls of the employed, Kyser said.
   “About 40 percent of the nation’s imports come through the L.A. ports and probably 40 percent to 50 percent of containers that pass through Los Angeles-Long Beach somehow move through the Inland Empire,” he said.
   Kyser and the LAEDC also predict that total value of two-way trade at the Los Angeles Customs District this year should grow 13.9 percent to $375.1 billion. Exports should increase 14.9 percent as a result of a weak U.S. dollar and “favorable” economic conditions in the region’s top trading partner countries, Kyser said in a release about the May 1 report.
   The report claims that as the trade activity has ramped up, it has caused a flood in the industrial real estate market eastward into the west end of Riverside and San Bernardino counties, both part of the so-called Inland Empire. That area is now facing “land availability challenges,” the report said, and industries ever-hungry for new land are heading toward the High Desert northeast of Los Angeles for space.