Investment in local economic expansion can produce significant improvements in quality of life for communities. To help educate residents about these positive signs in their areas, financial technology company SmartAsset released a study on the counties receiving the greatest amount of investment in their local economies.
Clinton County ranked among the top places in Indiana due to a strong showing in each of the factors considered including business growth, GDP growth, new building permits and federal funding.
The top 10 counties in the state of Indiana are in order: Hendricks, Hamilton, Boone, Hancock, Warrick, Johnson, Tippecanoe, Monroe, Clinton and LaGrange.
Methodology
There are several ways individuals, governments and businesses can invest money in a county or region. Our study aims to capture the places across the country that are receiving the most incoming investments in business, real estate, government and the local economy as a whole. To do this we looked at four factors: business establishment growth, GDP growth, new building permits and federal funding.
We looked at the change in the number of businesses established in each location over a 3-year period. This shows whether or not people are starting new business ventures in the county.
The second factor we looked at was the GDP growth. We used real growth (inflation adjusted) in the local economy.
We also looked at investment and development in the local residential real estate market. To measure this real estate growth, we calculated the number of new building permits per 1,000 homes.
The final factor we considered was federal funding received by each county. We found federal funding in the form of contracts awarded to businesses in each county, which we divided by the population. This gave us a per capita look at the flow of investment from the federal to the local level.
We scored every county in our study on these four factors. We then combined those scores to create a final ranking of cities. With that ranking, we created an index where the county with the most incoming investments was assigned a value of 100 and the county with the least investment activity received a zero.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau 2017 American Community Survey, Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), U.S. Census Bureau Building Permits Survey, USASpending.gov