by MARK AREND mark.arend bounce@conway.com

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ocation competitiveness can be measured using lots of metrics. Site Selection's four-year-old Competitiveness Award, covered on page 319, for example, draws heavily on the number of qualifying projects tracked the previous year and logged into the magazine's New Plant database. It looks at that data 10 different ways, resulting in an index linked inexorably to actual new facility announcements.
   Another useful competitiveness benchmark, now in its fifth year, is the Beacon Hill Institute's State Competitiveness Report, which uses an index of eight criteria categories, each with several pertinent factors built in. The categories are government and fiscal policy, security, infrastructure, human resources, technology, business incubation, openness and environmental policy. This benchmark is useful because it evaluates the 50 states from an entirely different perspective than Site Selection's. So rather than discount one over the other – and there are several others that also are useful – why not think of them as complementary?    Of note in the Beacon Hill Institute 2005 analysis is New England's strong performance, with Massachusetts ranking first, just as it did in 2004. It came in second the three previous years, so that first-place finish is no anomaly. New Hampshire finished third in 2005, up from 7th place in 2004. Vermont and Connecticut each placed in the top 50 percent, at 21st and 22nd respectively. Rhode Island and Maine have more work to do, finishing 37th and 38th overall, dropping slightly from their 2004 results.
   Chalk up Massachusetts' first-place finish to its performance in the technology, business incubation and human resources sub-indices. It ranked first in the first two of these and second in the third, human resources. Among the Bay State's competitive advantages in the technology component are National Institute of Health funding to institutions per capita; the number of science and engineering graduate students and degrees awarded per 100,000; patents per 100,000 population and percentage of total wage and salary jobs in high-tech industries. Maryland came in second in this category and California third. The business incubation sub-index credits Massachusetts' venture capital investment per capita, IPO activity and bank deposits per capita. Colorado and Utah came in second and third in that sub-index.
   In two categories, infrastructure and environmental policy, Massachusetts does poorly, finishing 47th and 43rd respectively. In the case of infrastructure, the state is first in the number of high-speed lines per 1,000, but it loses points in average travel time to work, electricity prices per million BTUs and average apartment rental rates. Greenhouse gas emissions are behind the poor environmental policy showing.
   New Hampshire's third-place overall finish, just behind Utah, comes thanks to its relatively strong showing in human resources (5th place); business incubation (6th); openness (10th), meaning incoming foreign direct investment per capita; and security (10th), which pertains to crime rates. The chart on this page shows the top three states in each of the eight sub-indices; New England states are in boldface.
   As this issue went to press, the U.S. Census Bureau released its 2005 total taxes per capita ranking of the states. Three of the New England states made the top 10 on the list: Vermont placed first at $3,600.13, Connecticut came in fourth ($3,300.49) and Massachusetts placed seventh ($2,815.23).