Top 10 States With the Best Economies

(Related: 10 Most Expensive US Cities to Rent an Apartment) U.S. economic growth is highly reliant on the performance of individual states, some of which contribute more than others. Take California, which ranked as the fifth largest economy in the world in 2017, behind the U.S., China, Japan and Germany, and ahead of India, the U.K. and France. WalletHub recently looked at the 50 states and District of Columbia to see how they were performing. As might be expected, it came up with winners and losers. Among the winners was Hawaii, whose unemployment rate was just 2.1%. And Louisiana, which has the highest value of exports per capita, $12,161. At 8.5%, New Hampshire has the lowest share of the population living in poverty, and South Dakota has the lowest foreclosure rate in the country, a disappearingly small 0.009%. Then, there's Massachusetts, which has bragging rights for the state with the highest share of jobs in high-tech industries, 7.9% — take that, West Coast! In order to determine the best state economies, WalletHub compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across three key dimensions: economic activity, economic health and innovation potential. It evaluated those dimensions using 28 relevant metrics, grading each on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the highest economic performance. A state's score was a weighted average across all metrics. Check out the gallery to see how the 10 states with the best economies scored overall and how each ranked on the three key dimensions. --- Related on ThinkAdvisor:

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