Top 5 states for business in 2012

These five states were the best places to do business in 2012, a year where states' financial fortunes finally saw improvement. Can you guess which state was number one?

4. North Carolina

Jason E. Miczek / AP Images for Siemens/File
North Carolina Gov. Beverly Purdue, right, speaks during the Siemens Charlotte gas turbine plant opening last November in Charlotte, NC. North Carolina is a perennial contender in the Top States for Business race, thanks to a well-educated workforce.

Fourth-ranked North Carolina is often a contender, thanks in large part to its well-educated workforce. This year, more of those workers are available. It’s a silver lining to a jobs crisis that has disproportionately affected the Tarheel State, where unemployment is considerably higher than the national average. North Carolina slipped one spot from a number three ranking in 2011.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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