Voices: does it matter that Los Angeles has so few Fortune 500 companies? What does it mean for the city to be home to lots of small and medium-sized firms?

Lee Harrington President and Chief Executive Los Angeles Economic Development Corp.

IF you compared the profile of Los Angeles today with where we were in 1989 or 1990, the difference really is in the number and size of the business base and the diversity of industries. Now we have what I'd call "the resilience factor," which is a function of having many more small companies that weather the good times and bad times. That doesn't mean we won't have a lot of business failures, but it also means many of the new startups will make it. Where Los Angeles is losing the most opportunities is in the expansions of companies that are going out of state. We did a survey two years ago and found the barriers to staying in Southern California were regulations, taxes, the availability of qualified labor, and recruiting and retaining key employees. Larger businesses have the internal mechanisms to cope with those problems, whereas small businesses don't.

Chris Martin Chief Executive A.C. Martin Partners

WHAT it says is that L.A. is not a good place to put a headquarters because of taxation and labor costs, which is not a surprise. The fact is it's very expensive to live here and the state is not necessarily friendly to businesses, nor is L.A. County or the city. I would love to see Los Angeles be healthy again for big business. I would love to see the L.A. mayor say that he's going to bring three Fortune 500 companies back to L.A. But if you have a company headquartered here, you look at the business tax and the gross revenues receipts--and you can't afford it. I'm a fifth-generation Californian and my company will turn 100 next year, so I can't leave.

Stephen J. Dutka Senior Vice President Fiduciary Trust International of California

WE'RE a global economy, but because of high labor costs, it doesn't really make sense to actually build a product here. I don't see anything in the near future changing that. If anything, large companies will continue to move out of the state. One of the things we've seen is a large number of young, educated people leaving the state in numbers we've never seen before. That's having two effects on the economy--they're starting new companies elsewhere, and large companies that need a talented pool of labor are following them to Arizona, Texas, and the Carolinas. What does that leave us with? A very entrepreneurial-focused environment that brings with it a lot of other risks. Young companies don't necessarily have the safety net that large companies do.

Lars Ekstrom Managing Director Goldsmith-Agio-Helms

BACK in the 1980s, (the economy) was concentrated in just a few industries --automotive, aerospace and breweries. Now there are many more diverse industries, which is better for the economy because when one industry gets hit, it won't pull the whole area down. From an investment banker's perspective, it's a good thing because this is a very entrepreneurial economy. New businesses are always starting up, and private equity firms are helping fuel the economy because many of these entrepreneurs are at the point in their life where they want to cash out.

Robert Pardo President Marcus Adams Capital LLC 

FROM a real estate investor's point of view, it's good for L.A. because it does add diversity. You're not beholden to a few companies, where if there's a problem, the entire economy suffers. We don't compete with institutional real estate buyers, because they're looking at real estate that gets leased to the top 50 companies in the city. We go down a lot further. I think it creates a more robust real estate market because you have a bigger pool of tenants to go to if you're buying buildings, whereas if you have just a few companies, they tend to control the market. On the other hand, we don't see a lot of high-tech companies; most of our tenants are very basic, bread-and-butter type companies.