Metro Area and State Competititveness Report 2004 – Montana Ranks 28th

The Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University is pleased to release the 4th
edition of its Metro Area and State Competitiveness Report.

This year’s report
contains some slight modifications from previous years’ editions. Like any
good index, such as the Dow Jones Industrial or others, the BHI
Competitiveness Indexes must adapt to a changing business environment.

As economies grow and change, so must the parameters that strive to measure
them. To this end, BHI has added new variables to the index and discontinued
the use of others. In some cases, the discontinued variables are no longer
being published, but in most cases the discovery of a better variable
precipitated the removal of the older one. We believe these minor
modifications serve to advance the usefulness of the indexes.
At the state level, Massachusetts moved up one position to claim the top spot,
displacing last year’s number one, Delaware. All of the states in the top ten,
with the exception of Vermont, improved their position over last year.

The
biggest improvement among the states in the top ten belonged to Nebraska,
which improved its ranking from 15th to 6th. The state with the largest
improvement in the entire index is North Dakota, which moved up seventeen
positions from 28th to 11th.

The state with the dubious distinction of having the
biggest drop in the ranking is New Jersey, it moved down eighteen places from
26th to 44th.

At the metro area level, the top ten remains very stable, with Kansas City being
the only metro area not ranked in the top ten last year. Seattle retains its
position at number one, which it held in the two previous indexes.

The metro
areas of Raleigh and Portland round out the top three in the index, moving up
four and six places respectively. Dallas gains the right to the biggest
improvement title, moving from 45th to 13th. Several metro areas dropped over
twenty positions including Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Cincinnati and
Chicago.

The institute would like to thank authors Jonathan Haughton and Cagdas Sirin
for their work on this year’s edition. We hope that the Report will continue to
be a topic of discussion for lawmakers, voters and academics in metro areas
and states across the country.

Full Report: http://www.beaconhill.org/Compete04/Compete2004WebONLY.pdf