About the Project:

The project began in July, 1994, with the development of a regional economic and business data collection and forecasting center, in conjunction with California State University, Sacramento's Real Estate and Land Use Institute. The goal of this enterprise was to provide for the collection of timely monthly and quarterly data for activities in the Sacramento Region and the reporting of the same to interested parties and the public. Part I of this project involved the establishment of EXCEL databases for the various entities covered by or impacting on the Sacramento Region. Part II, beginning in October, 1994, was the semi-annual dissemination of the current and forecasted values to interested parties in the Sacramento Region. The funded aspect of this project ended in July, 1995.

An Internet presence was established on the CSU,S server in July, 1996, to broaden the exposure of the project's publications. The web pages included forecasts, graphs and tables for each of the eleven counties in the Sacramento Economic Area, the Component Economic Areas (CEA's), the State of California, and the US.  County data is primarily focused on employment and taxable sales (using the Labor Force Survey information from the State's Employment Development Department and the Taxable Sales reports from the State's Board of Equalization). The web site address for the Sacramento Forecast Project WAS http://www.csus.edu/indiv/j/jensena/sfp/ on the CSU,S server until access for updating was denied at the end of February, 2009. I established a new domain for the project and moved the presentation to the new web site (SacramentoForecastProject.org).

The Sacramento Economic Area, defined by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce as Economic Area #164, is composed of eleven counties in northern-central California. The Sacramento Forecast Project maintains data bases, as well as issuing semi-annual reports and forecasts of taxable sales and employment activities, for each of the counties, the MSA/CEA's, the Economic Area, California and the Nation.

The pages are generally updated twice each year. The tentative update schedule (subject to the availability of data and the variability of my schedule) is: End of January, July. The latest full revision was July, 2012.

The next revision is expected to be completed by or around January 31, 2013.

Accuracy and Forecasting are not synonymous. It is the express intent of the Project to provide as accurate as possible a view of potential economic activity and, to that end, every effort is made to maintain up-to-date data bases and verify the consistency of the data. No guarantee can be made however of either the validity of the data, nor the accuracy of the forecasts made from the data. I assume that the Data Providers are providing consistent series's (measuring the same thing from time period to time period) and care is taken to execute the forecasts in a consistent manner. But I can not be held accountable for the vagaries of forecasting the future.

Forecast users should be concerned with the potential accuracy of any forecast or forecaster. To that end, I have designed the presentation of the forecasts to show both the actual data and what that observation was forecasted to be. This information is shown on the data tables. The forecasts are the last forecast made for that variable before the actual data was received, usually one to three months before.

The complete record of forecasts made for the national economy, beginning in 1977, are available in Table form, or graphs of Real Growth, Unemployment, and Inflation.