The Kansas Business Environment

Abstract

This research was sponsored by Kansas, Inc. to be used as one source of information that informed the steering committee whose charge was the revision of the earlier state strategy developed by Kansas, Inc. The revision was intended to take the original state strategy as a starting point, and, using the three or four years of experience accumulated since it was implemented, see what mid-course corrections might be most beneficial. The research in this report is an assessment of the business climate in Kansas as reported by the firms who do business in the state. Since the state has had a package of economic development programs in place for approximately a decade, it was presumed that the business environment in Kansas relative to that of other states was relatively good. It was the goal of the study to identify a few areas that remain problematic, in the hope that limited economic development resources could be moved into areas where they would produce the largest gains.

A telephone survey of 800 Kansas businesses was conducted during August and September of 1996. The population consisted of those firms which would in general face competition from out of state businesses. A stratified sampling procedure was used, in which the population was broken into six different categories composed of small, medium, and large firms in manufacturing and service industries.