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Los Angeles Drops 20 Places In Best-Performing Cities Ranking

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) — The City of Angels has dropped 20 places behind areas like the Inland Empire and the Bay Area on the Milken Institute's Best-Performing Cities Index released Thursday.

California fared rather well in the index, which examines job creation, wage gains and technological developments to measure the economic vitality of metropolitan areas – but the cities that did best were all located in the Bay area and in Silicon Valley.

READ IT HERE: Best-Performing Cities Report (PDF)

"High-profile corporate site searches like Amazon's HQ2 competition highlight the importance of a strong knowledge-based economy," Minoli Ratnatunga, co-author and Milken Institute director of regional economics research, said in a statement. "Tech companies, augmented by research universities, are among the most powerful assets a metro can have in our tech-driven economy."

Los Angeles dropped 20 places from No. 61 last year, to No. 81 this year. The Anaheim-Santa Ana-Irvine area also dropped nine places in the ranking, from No. 47 to No. 56.

Five California cities placed in the Top 25, with San Francisco in fourth place and the neighboring Oakland-Hayward-Berkeley area at No. 14. The Riverside-San-Bernardino-Ontario area, rose a spot to No. 15, with its proximity to Los Angeles cited as an asset.

A California city showed the most improvement of the 199 cities ranked -- Merced, which jumped 56 places to No. 38.

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