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North Carolina
Rank Metro area Population # of small businesses
(1-49 employees)*
  Asheville 408,436 11,695
  Burlington 148,053 6,619
#7 among large places Charlotte 1,701,799 42,926
#15 among midsize places Durham 489,762 11,007
  Fayetteville 356,105 10,389
  Goldsboro 113,671 2,233
  Greensboro 705,684 17,442
  Greenville 176,758 3,636
  Hickory 363,036 7,722
  Jacksonville 165,938 2,631
#3 among large places Raleigh 1,088,765 27,659
  Rocky Mount 146,356 2,994
#14 among midsize places Wilmington 347,012 10,242
  Winston-Salem 468,124 10,342
Source: U.S. Census Bureau 2007 County Business Patterns.
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Find your launch spot
Do you prefer a place that is: Small Medium Large
The factors that matter most to me are:
 Affordable wages  Few foreclosures
 Educated workers  Low housing costs
 Low crime  High local incomes
 A growing economy  Population growth
 Growing small business population

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How we picked the Best Places
This year we partnered with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to find the 50 most business-friendly communities in America.

With help from Robert Fairlie, an economist and leading scholar of entrepreneurship at the University of California, Santa Cruz, we developed a methodology and sifted through such data on factors such as per capita income, hourly wages, workforce quality, crime rates, taxes and foreclosures. More

Comments? E-mail the editors
Data partners

This package was produced in partnership with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

Foreclosure data provided by RealtyTrac.

Housing price-to-income data provided by Moody's Economy.com.