Vested interest
A new study has Dane County in the lead in Wisconsin when it comes to incoming investment.
The balance of economic power in Wisconsin could be further shifting away from the state’s most populous county to Dane County, according to the annual SmartAsset study on places receiving the most investment income.
In the study, SmartAsset, a financial technology company based in New York City, measures real growth (inflation adjusted) in gross domestic product (GDP) in the local economy, new business launches over a three-year period, and new building permits to determine the places receiving the most investment locally.
SmartAsset scored every county in the study on these three factors and then combined those scores to create a final ranking of counties. With that methodology, it created an index where the county with the most incoming investments (Los Angeles County, California) was assigned a value of 100 and the county with the least investment activity received a zero.
Dane County ranked first among Wisconsin’s 72 counties with an index score of 34.46. Among the 3,142 counties and equivalents in all 50 states of the U.S., Dane County ranked 466th, or in the top 15% of all counties nationally.
Tellingly, one county that is not in the top 10 in the state is Wisconsin’s most populous — Milwaukee County — which ranked 13th statewide and outside the top 1,000 counties nationally (1,055).
The accompanying table provides the study’s measurements for the Top 10 counties in Wisconsin:
