Economic Perspective: North Carolina’s Business Ranking

MARY WALDEN:

“Today’s program looks at North Carolina’s business ranking. Mike, a new ranking of the states for their attractiveness to businesses was just released by CNBC. What factors are included in this ranking, and how did North Carolina do?”

MIKE WALDEN:

“Well there are a lot of these rankings that come out periodically. I think the interesting thing about this ranking is it was based on a lot of factors, in fact 60 factors. They measured things like the workforce, education, cost of living, quality of infrastructure and quality of life. The good news here is that North Carolina came in third among all the states behind Virginia and Texas.”

“Now North Carolina didn’t score third or higher on everything, but we did score well on things like our public fiscal health, our budget. Our state budget is in good shape. Investors like that we have a very large rainy day fund that we can dip into if we go into a recession. As a result, North Carolina has a very solid and high credit rating. We have good access to capital. If you look at our workforce, our workforce is productive. It scores very high on productivity, and we do have a steady supply of college educated workers not just coming from our universities in the state, but people who have a college education in other states. They are moving here to North Carolina. So those are all on the plus side.”

“Now we did have some negatives. We did not score well on our crime rate, and we did not score well on our healthcare coverage. But overall, a very positive report, but obviously there are always some things that we can improve.”