Ohio Ranked 7th for Best Business Climate

ATLANTA – Ohio ranks seventh on the list of Site Selection’s “Top State Business Climate” for 2015, the magazine announced Monday.

Georgia came in first followed by North Carolina, Kentucky, Louisiana, Texas and Tennessee. After Ohio came Utah, Oklahoma and Indiana to round out the magazine’s top 10.

Site Selection based its rankings on a survey of corporate site selectors whom the magazine staff asked to rank the 50 states based on their recent experiences of locating operations within them.

That accounted for half the weighting the magazine assigned.

The other half was based on an index of seven criteria, among which were performance in Site Selection’s annual competitiveness rankings; total new facilities in 2014 per capita and total new 2015 new projects year-to-date.

The executives surveyed ranked Texas as having the best business climate followed by Georgia, Florida and North Carolina, which tied for second. South Carolina came in fifth, followed by Tennessee, Indiana and Kentucky. Alabama and Utah tied for ninth.

The magazine said its top location criteria for this year were “existing workforce skills, state and local tax scheme, transportation infrastructure, utility infrastructure, land/building prices and supply, ease of permitting and regulatory procedures.” Whether the state is a right-to-work state tied for seventh with “flexibility of incentive programs.” Availability of incentives was subordinate to the flexibility of incentive programs and No. 10 was access to higher education resources.

The survey was conducted in October.

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