Fifteen years ago, Ohio was ranked 35th in CNBC’s ranking of the top states for business. This year, Ohio ranks fifth.
Katherine Saunders, partner and head of strategy and leadership at Economic Leadership LLC, says that dramatic improvement is in part due to Ohio tracking its economic data and using that information to help improve its business climate.
Her comments were made as part of a panel entitled “Competitive Edge: How States Win” held Wednesday during the Connecticut Business & Industry Association’s 2025 The Connecticut Economy event at the Hartford Marriott Hotel.
The event, attended by more than 370 people, included the release of CBIA’s annual survey of Connecticut Businesses, which it produced with the support of accounting and business advisory firm CBIZ Inc.
Saunders said she has done “a lot of work in Cincinnati and Columbus” in Ohio, and has seen how that state uses its economic data “to inform how they approach economic development projects, how they approach policy.”
“It’s a non-partisan view of that, really looking at it as how can we lift up everyone around us through economic mobility, … economic opportunity, success,” she added.
Joining Saunders on the panel, which was moderated by Duby McDowell of Intersect Public Solutions, was Mary Kane, president and CEO of the Maryland Chamber of Commerce, and Dustin Nord, director of the CBIA Foundation for Economic Growth & Opportunity.
Kane was invited to discuss a pamphlet her organization produces called Maryland’s 2025 Competitiveness Redbook, a guidebook with data points that help inform policy, she said.
“We did this because we just needed something to show our General Assembly and our new governor that we are not ranking very well,” Kane said, “and that there are policy decisions that have been made that are keeping us towards the bottom.”
She added, “You don’t know where you are unless you know where you are.”
In the latest CNBC rankings, Maryland ranks 32nd, four slots below Connecticut, which ranked 28th.
Nord said CBIA has joined the list of states producing a pamphlet-sized guidebook for legislators and stakeholders that tracks Connecticut’s economic competitiveness.
“It’s a great place to have all the stats in one place, a valuable resource,” he said. “It seemed like a good opportunity for us to do something similar.”
CBIA’s 55-page guidebook, called “By the Numbers: Tracking Connecticut’s Economic Competitiveness,” includes 50 charts showing how Connecticut ranks in everything from population growth (29th) and net migration (40th) to state and local government average annual pay (2nd) and hourly minimum wages (4th).
Saunders praised the CBIA Foundation for its work in developing its guidebook.
“The nice thing about the way that it’s structured in Connecticut is the … CBIA Foundation has been able to take a non-partisan look at the data and use that to inform a lot of the strategy for the state overall, and with other partners throughout the state, both public and private,” she said.
In his welcoming remarks at the start of the event, CBIA President and CEO Chris DiPentima said that 38 of 59, or two-thirds of the policy recommendations provided to the legislature for the 2025 session “are already being acted on,” with a number of them being approved.
One example of that was the replacement of the Transfer Act with a new regulatory framework, DiPentima said.
The state Department of Economic and Community Development, he added, “projects that those reforms alone will create 2,100 new jobs, generate $3.78 billion in new GDP growth in Connecticut, and $115 million in additional revenue for the state over the next five years.”
Nord said CBIA’s goal is to post the data online, as well as producing a booklet similar to Maryland’s.
“Having a dashboard online and being able to track these different stats as time goes on is really important,” he said.
