note: 全美最适合开展业务的城市，名列第一！可能是因为税少吧，有很多世界500强总部落户于此
Minneapolis is No. 1 in MarketWatch study of best metro centers for business
By Russ Britt, MarketWatch
Last update: 12:01 a.m. EDT Sept. 21, 2007
LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) -- Forget the bone-chilling winters, the Buick-sized summer mosquitoes and the "Minnesota Nice" demeanor mocked in the film "Fargo."
Minneapolis-St. Paul is where it's at when it comes to business, much more so than any other of the nation's major urban areas. The Twin Cities ranked at the top of a MarketWatch study on the nation's best metro centers for business, winning by a wide margin. Minneapolis-St. Paul got 329 points, 38 points ahead of second-place Denver.
MarketWatch special report
BEST U.S. CITIES
FOR BUSINESS
Minnesota nice
Minneapolis-St. Paul ranks No. 1 in our review of the best cities for business. The region is a magnet for companies big and small, public and private.
• See the full special report
More:
• The rest of the best cities
• Which cities are in the bottom 10?
• Methodology and ranking of 50 cities
A healthy collection of companies -- old and new, small and large, public and private -- put the greater Twin Cities near the top in many categories in the study, which measured the concentration of businesses in the nation's 50 most populous markets, as well as the job picture in each city. Minneapolis-St. Paul proved resilient in keeping its jobless rate low in a check of unemployment statistics.
How could this northern outpost with extreme weather rank at the top? The high concentration of businesses is due to a living environment that makes it hard to leave, locals and executives say.
"When you get here, you realize it's kind of a unique combination of manageable size and rich and diverse lifestyle offerings," said Steve Sanger, chairman and chief executive of food-making giant General Mills Inc., a Minneapolis mainstay. Sanger came to the area from Cincinnati 33 years ago and never left.
"You can live on a lake and get to the office in 15 minutes," he said.
This MarketWatch special report looked at eight different metrics. While companies have many different reasons for locating in a given region, the study did not focus on subjective qualities. Do businesses really locate in a particular city because of weather, perceived quality of life or even taxes? Anecdotally, some do.
But we decided to look at data that indicate where businesses are and find out the reasons why.
....
Rankings
Here's how Minneapolis-St. Paul got to the top spot:
-- It ranked second in both the concentration of Fortune 1000 and S&P 500 companies. There are 32 Fortune 1000 companies and 15 S&P 500 firms in the metropolitan area.
The companies on those lists are a who's who of corporate America, including No. 2 discount retailer Target Corp. (TGT
-- Minneapolis-St. Paul ranked sixth in the Forbes 400 private companies category. The Twin Cities is home to travel giant Carlson Cos. and building materials maker Andersen. Farm-products maker Cargill, second on the Forbes list with $70 billion in annual sales, is also based there.
-- Finally, the region was fourth in concentration of small businesses, measured here as companies with fewer than 500 employees.
Its accumulation of consistently high marks in those five business categories put Minneapolis-St. Paul well ahead of the pack. Its closest competitor was New York, followed by San Francisco.
The Twin Cities ranked 28th in population growth and 21st in job growth, according to stats dating back to 2000. Including those stats weighed down New York and San Francisco even more, though, and others like Denver, Boston, Richmond, Va., and Charlotte, N.C., moved up in the rankings.
Other regions may favor a certain type of industry; the San Francisco Bay Area's strong technology influence put it first in both the S&P and Russell categories. But a lack of industrial diversity wreaked havoc on the region in the early part of the decade, so it placed poorly in job growth and unemployment statistics used for the survey. San Francisco also didn't excel in the Forbes and small-business metrics.
Minneapolis-St. Paul, meanwhile, seems to have the most diverse business mix, helping it to weather economic downturns better. Much of the U.S. was caught in a recession in the early 1990s, for example, but the Twin Cities kept adding jobs, says Toby Madden, regional economist for the Federal Reserve Bank's Minnesota branch.
"It looked like Minneapolis just kept going on through that," Madden said.
Ref: The fulltext is here:
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/minneapolis-tops-among-metro-centers/story.aspx?guid=%7BCA19E070-81F3-4D15-9559-CFF9194DC6C0%7D&print=true&dist=printTop
