Metro rankings

There are many rankings released every year for states and metropolitan areas on their economic performance, and one recently released ranking puts a couple of North Carolina metropolitan areas in a good light. N.C. State University economist Mike Walden explains.

“This is a report that comes out every year from the Milken Institute, a well-respected institute that looks at economics around the country. They issue a report on what they call the best-performing metro regions.

“They put a lot of focus in this report on measuring job growth and wage growth, and they pay particular attention to economies where high technology is an important part. The good news here is that for 2012 — now this is for the year 2012, so this report just came out — both the Raleigh-Cary and the Durham-Chapel Hill metro areas were in the top 25 in terms of best-performing regions.

“Raleigh-Cary was at number three. Durham-Chapel Hill was at number 21. And both of these rankings were better for those metro regions than they were in 2011.

“If you’re interested, San Jose and Austin were the number one and number two metro regions in terms of this ranking.

“Now there was also good news for one of our other metro areas in the state, Charlotte. They made the list of the most improved metropolitan areas, rising from 114 ranking in 2011 to number 35 in 2012.

“So, this tells us that North Carolina continues to be on the national map with respect to its very dynamic metropolitan areas.”