The Sacramento Forecast Project, in its current form, began in 1994 and the Web Site was first published in July of 1996. The Project collects a variety of data pertinent to the Sacramento Economic Area for the purpose of analyzing and forecasting local area economic conditions. 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 the 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 January, 2009 and the next revision is expected to be completed by or around July 31, 2009.

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 neither California State University, Sacramento, the College of Business Administration, the Sacramento Forecast Project, nor myself can be held liable 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, have been attached to the United States page.