Going back to jobs, my favorite survey (and one I think is very meaningful) is the Business Climate Survey. This more than anything shows the importance of how a good business climate can attract real sustainable jobs (as oppose to federal govt pork jobs). From Forbes, here's the introduction for the 2003 results
Quote:
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To reflect the changing times, we changed the way we compile our ranking of Best Places For Business And Careers, turning to analysts at Economy.com, the West Chester, Pa.-based economic and financial research firm. In this, our fifth annual survey, we still kept a careful eye on income and job growth. But we also gave special attention to the cost-of-doing-business, which includes the prices of labor, energy, taxes and office space [my emphasis]. We looked closely at the qualifications of the available pool of labor. For the first time our rankings also characterized the attractiveness of a region by figuring in crime rates, housing costs and net migration.
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If you are interested in the results by metro area, go
here.
Many of the metro areas of the Southeast are high on the list, a definite improvement when similar rankings were published in the 1980s and 1990s. This is what needs to be encouraged by local officials, State politicians and federal policy makers - creating a good business climate to attract entrepreneurs and companies, thus creating higher paying jobs. In many cases, I would argue, it involves the State and Feds getting out of the way (e.g., reducing taxes, reducing regulations) and encouraging shifts away from union-dependent, increasingly obsolete or outdated companies (take a look at the metro areas on the bottom of the list).