Illinois and Missouri both lost ground this year in Site Selection magazine’s influential business climate ranking. The magazine’s latest league table, based partly on a survey of executives and partly on actual plant-location decisions, has Illinois No. 14 and Missouri No.…

Randal O’Toole is a scholar at the conservative Cato Institute. The Daily Kos is a liberal blog. You wouldn’t expect them to agree on much, and they certainly disagree on the subject of high-speed rail. In a lengthy post yesterday, the…

Those spoilsports at the Show-Me Institute are throwing cold water on Missouri politicians’ dream of building a high-speed rail line. They’ve published a new study by Randal O’Toole that says a Kansas City-St. Louis linewould cost $875 million to build, post…

The Corporation for Enterprise Development, which espouses policies that help Americans build savings, start businesses and buy homes, gives middling marks to both Missouri and Illinois.

Both states got solid C’s on CFED’s latest Assets and Opportunity Scorecard. That’s better than…

Advantage Capital Partners, a venture capital firm with an office in Clayton, hopes to raise $50 million to invest in alternative-energy companies in Missouri and Illinois. R. Foster Duncan, a managing director of Advantage, mentioned the new fund Friday at…

The markets haven’t been kind to MegaWest Energy, the Canadian company that began producing oil in western Missouri last year. Falling oil prices forced the company to suspend production jst a few months after it started, and the wells have been idle…

A bigger role for the federal government in health care will make costs accelerate even faster,  a new Show-Me Institute study says. The study, by Arthur Laffer’s firm Arduin Laffer & Moore Econometrics, is based on the same research that Laffer…

The Show Me Institute, which has been campaigning to eliminate Missouri’s income tax, posted a new case study today in support of that cause. Authors Jenifer Zeigler Roland and David Roland compare Missouri’s economic performance with that of Tennessee, its neighbor to the…

The federal government’s “cash for clunkers” program is plenty confusing, especially with the Senate still deciding whether to give it more money. One issue that’s sowing confusion in some parts of the country, though, isn’t a problem in Missouri or Illinois: Neither…

Farm real-estate values are down this year for the first time since 1987, a new Agriculture Department report shows. The 3.2 percent nationwide decline, to an average of $2,100 an acre, is partly about crop prices and partly about the…