By Eric Johnson

CHAPEL HILL (October 26, 2022) – The Financial Times released its first-ever ranking this month of the top cities in America for attracting foreign investment. 

Charlotte and Raleigh finished among the top 10, scoring alongside perennial favorites like Boston, New York, and Miami in the competition for global capital. Greensboro rounded out the top 20, giving North Carolina more globally competitive metro areas than any state except Texas. 

“North Carolina has become something of a hub of such cities, joining others in the south-east with pro-business labor laws and low corporate taxes,” the FT reported. “The state has three in the … ranking’s top 20, with executives citing the state’s lower cost of living as a key driver.”

It wasn’t just taxes and house prices that drove the FT rankings. The place where North Carolina really excelled against competitors — and the advantage that state economic developers cite most often when courting major companies — is education. 

Raleigh and Charlotte outperformed every top-10 city except Boston when it came to “workforce and talent,” the single biggest factor in the FT rankings, driven largely by educational attainment and access to top-tier colleges and universities. 

“Talent is at the top of the list for foreign investors,” the FT explained. “Apart from proximity to customers, analysis by fDi Markets of corporate announcements showed that a skilled workforce was the most cited reason for [foreign direct investment] into the US in 2021.”

That gels with what we’ve heard repeatedly over the last few years as companies like Toyota, VinFast, Google, Apple and Wolfspeed announced major plans for growth in North Carolina. You can’t build electric cars, program AI software, or manufacture silicon carbide wafers without a lot of very smart, hardworking people. 

You get those people by creating an education system with lots of different pathways to success, from high-quality career and technical programs in high schools and community colleges to specialized degrees in engineering, information science, and global marketing at the state’s public universities. 

I asked Tom White, the longtime director of economic development at NC State University, about North Carolina’s standout performance in the competition for international jobs and capital.

“It’s built on a 40-year history of attracting inward investment,” White said, citing the Research Triangle Park’s success in building a biotech and pharmaceutical hub and Charlotte’s status as a financial center. “Being receptive to foreign investment, taking the time to build the infrastructure, is crucial. You want to have these opportunities to grow.”

The state’s next big challenge is making sure those opportunities expand beyond the booming regions of the Triangle, Charlotte, and Triad. 

White talked about efforts to bring green energy manufacturing to eastern North Carolina, a pitch that will depend in no small measure on building a specially trained workforce in counties that have seen a net loss of population over the past generation. 

And he pointed to the growth of biotech and pharmaceutical firms across the Piedmont as evidence of demand for highly specialized work beyond the confines of the major cities. 

We have immense struggles with social mobility even in our fast-growing counties. Strong economic growth alongside generational poverty shows that we haven’t done nearly enough to introduce the poorest North Carolinians to a world of opportunity that exists, in many cases, right next door.

That’s an indictment of unequal K-12 schools and a failure of imagination about how to give adults without a degree a second chance at higher education. Our public universities and community colleges need to do a much better job reaching people who are stuck in dead-end jobs or disconnected from the workforce – people who would benefit most from a pathway into a high-growth industry.

There’s much more to a state than building a business-friendly environment, of course. But part of the reason I like these rankings is they scramble our lazy political categories. You don’t prosper by being a uniformly conservative bastion or leading the vanguard of progressive policy. It takes a more pragmatic mix, a balance of good infrastructure, funding for education, reasonable taxes, regulatory reform, and much else. 

In an age when political extremes dominate the conversation, North Carolina’s status as a genuinely purple place where Republicans and Democrats can still strike a compromise has paid dividends for our citizens. That makes for a lousy campaign ad, but a pretty decent place to live and work.

Eric Johnson is a writer in Chapel Hill. He works for the College Board and the University of North Carolina. He can be reached at ericjohnson@unc.edu.