Valdosta MSA does OK in nationwide ranking

Valdosta #51 of 379! Closest MSAs as green on the map are Auburn-Opelika #37, Atlanta #41, Charleston #11, and Nashville, TN at #14.

Highest weighted components are for growth in jobs, wages, and salaries, so apparently there has been some improvement in those areas. Here are the rank components from the PDF report, plus the corresponding scores from www.best-cities.org:

Rank Job Growth Wage Growth Short-Term
Job Growth		 High-Tech
GDP
Growth		 High-Tech
GDP
LQ		 Number of
High-Tech
Industries
Change 2012 2013 2007-12 2011-12 2006-11 2010-11 7/2012- 7/2013 2007-12 2011-12 2012 with LQ≥1 2012
50 101 51 128 33 73 133 84 15 4 76 13
Score 97.36 100.68 102.32 97.65 109.89% 129.20 119.63 0.56 6.0
The five job growth components are weighted 1/7th each, and the four high-tech components are weighted half as much, 1/14th each. The first four scores appear to be relative to 100 for the entire U.S. Where exactly Milliken Institute got their data is not clear, especially for these:

High-tech location quotients (LQs), which measure the industry’s concentration in a particular metro relative to the national average, are included to gauge an area’s participation in the knowledge-based economy. We also measure the number of specific high-tech fields (out of a possible 22) whose concentrations in an MSA are higher than the national average.

It’s worth remembering jobs and salaries are not everything:

Best-Performing Cities is solely an outcomes-based index. It does not incorporate input measures (business costs, cost-of-living components, and quality-of-life conditions such as commute times or crime rates). These measures, although important, are prone to wide variations and can be highly subjective.

Still, which are the six LQ > 1 high-tech companies in the Valdosta MSA? And wouldn’t a solar company help boost that? More than a pipeline, anyway….

-jsq