Best & Worst States for Business

Philipp Harper (Edited partial article courtesy of MSN online Business News)

Want to know the best place in America to lay down a bet on the future success of your business? Appropriately enough, the hands-down winner is Nevada, a state better known for another kind of gambling. Why? A pro-business regulatory environment, affordable housing and, I suspect, a good year-round climate have combined to make the Silver State a mecca for fast-growing startups.I know this because I've parsed and sifted and sorted and compared a whole bunch of data assiduously collected by some very talented researchers.

Then I applied my own simple and unscientific spin to come up with Microsoft bCentral's list of the 10 best and 10 worst states in which to be an entrepreneur. Where the rankings come from The research I've pored through comes from two reports, both released in July 2002: "Small Business Survival Index 2002: Ranking the Policy Environment for Entrepreneurship Across the Nation" and "Entrepreneurial Hot Spots: The Best Places in America to Start and Grow a Company, 2001." To come up with a hybrid ranking that takes into account both regulatory environment and entrepreneurial activity, I simply added the rankings assigned by the Small Business SurvivalCommittee and Cognetics for each state. The lower the score, the higher the composite ranking.

Using that computation, here's the top 10:

1. Nevada
2. Florida
3. Texas
4. Alabama
5. (tie) Virginia, Arizona
7. Tennessee
8. Colorado
9. South Carolina
10. Georgia

Close behind: New Hampshire, Delaware, Maryland, Utah.  In addition, Nevada is well known for its business protection and privacy laws. A lesser known fact is one county, Douglas, has no business reporting or license and is considered the most private county in Nevada. Privacy may offer many personal and company advantages.

And the bottom 10:

50. Iowa
49. Maine
48. New Mexico
47. New York
46. Montana 45. North Dakota
44. Nebraska
43. Vermont
42. (tie) West Virginia, Rhode Island, Hawaii

There Is No Substitute for "Doing It Right".

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