LOS ANGELES – Providence fell 10 spots to No. 39 while Boston moved up to No. 2 in MarketWatch’s second annual ranking of the nation’s best metropolitan areas for business.

Minneapolis-St. Paul returned as No. 1, outdistancing Beantown by more than 20 points, as the Twin Cities’ saw continued job growth, low unemployment and a high concentration of companies measured by the survey.

The MarketWatch ranking, based on data from a variety of sources, aims to spotlight metro areas “where companies tend to gravitate and create the most jobs,” Russ Britt, MarketWatch’s Los Angeles bureau chief, wrote in today’s report.

Greater Boston gained 19 points to 302 and moved up two spots from last year’s No. 4 ranking. Increases in the metro region’s concentration of small businesses and Fortune 1000 and 500 companies, and improvements in the relative jobless rate, outweighed the region’s bottom-10 score in population growth, MarketWatch said. The region continues to benefit from the state’s efforts to grow its health care, biotechnology and information technology sectors, as well as the presence of about 100 colleges – including the urban Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University – within 60 miles of the downtown,

Filling out the Top 10 were No. 3 Denver, with 297 points; Washington, D.C., with 282; Richmond, Va., with 275 points; Charlotte, N.C., with 268 points; Columbus, Ohio, gaining seven spots to seventh place, with 263 points; Nashville and Dallas, in a tie for eighth place with 262 points apiece; and No. 10 San Francisco, with 260 points.

Falling furthest was Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla., which lost 55 points and 15 spots in the rankings. Other big losers included Providence and Birmingham, Ala., each falling 10 spots; San Diego, down seven notches; and Cleveland and Cincinnati, which fell four spots apiece.

In points, the biggest loser after Tampa-St. Pete was Buffalo, N.Y., which lost 46. Providence was next, with a loss of 31 points, followed by Birmingham, which shed 22 points; and Virginia Beach, which lost 18.

Contributors to Greater Providence’s decline included a rise in local unemployment and a change in the way MarketWatch evaluated small-business activity, Britt told Providence Business News in an e-mail interview today.

Providence plunged 15 spots in the small business ranking this year, “largely because we did a more comprehensive look in that category,” he wrote. “Last year, we only looked at small-business payroll and receipts per capita. This year, we took in all categories examined by the census bureau, including employment and number of establishments per capita,” Britt said.

The region’s decline in the unemployment category was “really just a matter of chance” he said. “We chose three months in three different years. Last year, the city did a little better in the years chosen than in the time-frame we picked this year.” Over the 12 months ended in October, however, the Providence metro jobless rate has risen 3.8 percentage points to 8.4 percent, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said in a separate report today. (READ MORE)

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