Business Leaders for Michigan (BLM) is a nonprofit organization composed of the chairpersons and senior executives of some of Michigan’s largest job providers and universities. BLM is dedicated to making Michigan a “Top Ten” state for jobs and economic growth. BLM retained Anderson Economic Group to provide data and analysis for its annual Benchmarking report. This is the ninth year AEG has assisted with the report.
AEG collected and analyzed data on over 60 socioeconomic indicators for all 50 states in order to determine where Michigan stands in its progress toward BLM’s goal of being a “Top Ten” state. We then compared Michigan’s performance to that of 12 peer states, as well as a group of “Top Ten” states. Our analysis covered fundamental economic measures such as employment, income, and GDP, as well as labor and energy costs, tax climate, infrastructure, and secondary and higher education performance.
We found that Michigan ranks 13th out of 50 states overall, as measured by a combination of total employment, per capita income, per capita GDP, and population, and growth rates for those metrics. BLM used our research and analysis to update it’s “Road to the Top Ten” website, which can be found at https://www.michigansroadtotopten.com/.