Economy of California: The driver of the US economy

California's economy just reached the 5th largest in the world, beating out the United Kingdom and all but four countries. California's economy grew to $2.747 trillion in 2017, eclipsing the United Kingdom's $2.625 trillion.

GDP: $2.798 trillion (2017)
GDP growth: 3.0% (2017)
GDP per capita: $70,760 (2017)
Labor force: 19,286,476 (December 2017)
Unemployment: 4.1% (Sept. 2018)
Household median salary: $71,805 (2017)
Population: 39,536,653

A Bloomberg Report: Subtract the state’s corporate and job growth, and the nation’s boom becomes a beep.

But when the Golden State's jobs and publicly traded companies are left out of the equation, he has little to brag about. That's because while U.S. nonfarm payrolls increased 4,063,000, or 2.8 percent, since the beginning of 2017, California represented 14 percent of new U.S. employment and led the country with 555,000 new jobs, a rise of 3.3 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Remove California from the job market and U.S. employment rose only 2.62 percent, a little better than Japan's 2.48 percent and less than Austria's 2.82 percent. The 19 countries that use the euro showed an increase of 2.41 percent.