America's Best Performing Cities

Why do some cites and metros grow faster and better than others? It's a subject of considerable, often heated debate. Some say that growth is a product of innovation and productivity that comes from the density of talent and business clustering. Others counter that growth is powered more by resources, home-building and extractive industries and continues to be driven by sprawling suburbs and metros in the Sun Belt and Plains.

Sometimes debates like these need a referee. That's where a new report on America's "Best-Performing Cities" released earlier this year by the Milken Institute comes in. The Institute has no dog in this show and its "Best-Performing Cities index" is a comprehensive and objective metric of metro economic performance (it uses the more commonly recognized term "cities" to reflect metro economies). Milken's index represents an "outcomes-based" accounting of short and long-term changes in economic output, high-tech industry, jobs, and wages. The rankings cover the 200 largest metros with a separate index for the 179 smaller metros.