The Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council (SBE Council) ranks Kansas and Missouri 21 and 24 respectively out of 50 for small business policy.
The SBE Council ranks all 50 states on policy measures and costs impacting entrepreneurship and small business growth every year in its Small Business Policy Index, which has been published for 20 years now. The ranking factors include a wide array of tax, regulatory, government spending and performance measurements.
While Missouri and Kansas fall somewhere in the middle, the states that topped the list of most policy-friendly to entrepreneurs are:
- Nevada
- Texas
- South Dakota
- Wyoming
- Florida.
The states that were found to need the most work are:
- Hawaii
- Minnesota
- New York
- New Jersey
- California.
Raymond J. Keating, SBE Council’s chief economist and author of the study, said the determining factors in this index “have real impacts not only on entrepreneurship, investment, small businesses and their workers, but naturally therefore, on the overall economy of each state.”
The report shows a correlation between better small business policy and population growth. The top 25 states in the index averaged state population growth of 4.9 percent from 2010 to 2015, versus only 2.5 percent for the bottom 25 states.
This year, the Small Business Policy Index has been expanded to include several new measures including Section 179 expensing conformity, project labor agreement mandates, insurance regulation and the indexing of corporate income tax brackets.
