Welcome to Missouri

PUBLISHED AUGUST, 2023

You could fill the better part of a day trying to build a comprehensive list of the qualities that make Missouri an ideal location to own or operate a business, to raise a family, to build a career, to vacation, to dine, to see championship-level professional and college sports, or—having done all that and more—to retire.

“What qualities?” you ask. Let us count the ways:

• Affordability. Only three states can claim lower aggregate cost-of-living indices than Missouri, where the value starts with housing but also beats national averages for costs of utilities, transportation, health care, groceries and miscellaneous spending.

• Centrality. It’s unlikely you’ve ever heard of Hartville, Mo., but the Wright County burg of 594 souls has a special significance in the nation’s population distribution: It’s dead-center in the country by that measure.

• Dependability. Especially with the workforce, the engine that drives nearly $300 billion in GDP—22nd among U.S. states.

• Economic Diversity. An analysis by stacker.com ranked Missouri No. 16 in terms of business-sector diversity, with nine sectors that produced more than 4 percent of the total GDP. Professional and business services led the way (13. percent), manufacturing chipped in 12.6 percent, real estate/leasing accounted for 11.4 percent, government enterprises produced 12 percent, and health care, education, and social assistance combined for 10.3 percent.

• Hospitality. Missouri is home to one of the nation’s most attractive summer playgrounds, the Lake of the Ozarks. By itself, it has more miles of shoreline (1,150) than California’s 840-mile coast. But the big lake is just one of a series that beckons boaters, fishers, campers, and hikers from Iowa to Arkansas, from Kansas to Illinois. Tourism, in fact, is one of the state’s leading industries, fueled in large part by in-state vacationing.

All of those are just for starters. Economic opportunity, however, may be the state’s biggest strength. Missouri still retains its commanding position in agriculture, a strength it has held since its settlement in the early 1800s. Today, though, agribusiness is also likely to include high-tech aspects of human, animal and plant sciences, biofuels and sophisticated processing, packaging and distribution for a wide range of customers worldwide. 

More recently, the explosive growth of the state’s logistics sector—shipping, warehousing, and distribution—has helped further diversify an already-varied business infrastructure.

Although Missouri’s position in the center of the nation makes for obvious advantages in truck, rail, and even telecommunications, the state is also reaching out to world markets. In the Kansas City region, new intermodal facilities have come online over the past decade, adding millions of square feet of industrial real estate to the mix.

The state has a key role in cross-continental shipping, as well, especially with the merger that created Canadian Pacific Kansas City, the area directly with deep-sea ports in Mexico, offering an economical way to avoid jammed Pacific ports while still providing excellent options for reaching the nation’s intermountain regions and shipping to both coasts.

And, as a particular point of pride, Missouri’s assets in support of entrepreneurs take a back seat to no state’s.

Missouri has historically been known as the Show-Me State, a double-edged nickname that derives from old-fashioned cynicism and the need to see something in person. Today, however, the “show-me” attitude still applies in a thriving state with 6.17 million residents who help put that success on display for the rest of the nation.