Home > Articles By Issue > July 2006

The 2006 Business Facilities Rankings Report

Only the best U.S. states and cities rise to the top of our nine rankings for 2006.

Each year in July, we rank locations across the United States to help you make educated decisions about where to begin your site search. The Business Facilities editorial staff has years of collective experience in observing trends in corporate expansion. We put this shared wisdom to work in this report by selecting nine categories that we believe interest our readership, then determining how we can rate states and cities in a way that brings the most investment-worthy locations to the top.

The result is a series of reports that ranks U.S. locations in automotive and transportation equipment manufacturing, biotechnology, workforce education levels, financial services, cost of labor, overall manufacturing, and tax climate. Each of these rankings is compiled by selectively choosing and weighting publicly available statistics, with the exception of our tax ranking report, which is a recapitulation of the highly regarded Business Tax Climate Index produced by the Tax Foundation in Washington, DC. Two more rankings, State Economic Development Achievement and the Readers’ Choice Ranking, are based on surveys of state economic development organizations and you, our readers, respectively.

A word about rankings in general: our experience is that even the most carefully researched ranking has limitations, often severe, based on your needs as a reader. All rankings make assumptions about how much value you will place on input factors, such as the percentage of residents with a college education, or the growth in manufacturing establishments over a defined period; our assumptions will not align wholly with your needs. Also, getting accurate data processed takes time, and in many cases the most recent data available can be several years old. Having said that, we do believe that those locations that rank high on our lists have done something right, something worth looking at. You’re bound to find instances in the following pages that will challenge your assumptions about which locations are winning over companies like yours.

Looking for U.S. state resources, click here.