Economy
During the latter part of the 20th century and early 21st century, Florence's economy was transformed from based largely on rail and farming into a diversified economy as the major commerce, finance, rail and trucking services, health care, and industral center of the Eastern Carolinas. There are over 9 foreign affiliated companies and fourteen Fortune 500 companies in the region. The gross domestic product (GDP) of the Florence metropolitan statistical area as of 2009 was $6.8 billion, one of the highest among MSAs in the state.
Milken Institute 2008 Best Performing Cities Index showed the Florence MSA as the 5th largest gainer in their evaluation of the top 124 small metropolitan areas in the United States. The report ranks U.S. metropolitan areas by how well they are creating and sustaining jobs and economic growth. The components include job, wage and salary and technology growth.
Florence has blossomed into a strong center for medical care, with three major medical providers McLeod Regional Medical Center, Carolinas Hospital System and HealthSouth. The growth of these providers has led to the transformation of the Florence skyline over the last 10 years, with development for demand with multi-story high-rises as well as community relation projects.
With such a strong medical community several companies have their global, continental, or national headquarters in Florence, including General Electric Medical Systems manufacturing operations, TRICARE, a supplemental insurance company that serves the US Armed Forces and its civilian employees, and Assurant, a real property and personal insurance company. The city also serves the pharmaceutical industry: with the North America headquarters for Hoffmann–La Roche a Swiss-owned company that provides a wide range of services to the pharmaceutical industry and research and development center for IRIX Pharmaceuticals.
Florence also serves as the financial and service hub for the Eastern Carolinas, with many financial and professional management institutions invested heavily within the city. Companies with regional operations and headquarters to include, JP Morgan Chase, BB&T, Monster.com and Bank of America. Florence has operation headquarters for at&t and Progress Energy Inc.
Florence has benefited being located at the intersection of I-95 and I-20, approximately halfway between New York City and Miami, Florida. The city is located 80 miles (130 km) east from the state capital Columbia, 70 miles (110 km) west from Myrtle Beach, 120 miles (190 km) North of Charleston, and 110 miles (180 km) southeast of Charlotte, North Carolina. This has allowed Florence to remain competitive and bringing in and sustaining major manufacturers such as Honda, ESAB, DuPont-Teijin Films, QVC Distribution Center, and Heinz.
Read more about this topic: Florence, South Carolina
Famous quotes containing the word economy:
“Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job,” but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)