Houston has been named one of 2013’s “Best Performing American Cities,” according to the Milken Institute’s “Best Performing Cities” Index. The city was named No. 8 out of America’s 200 largest metropolitan areas.

The Milken Index is an “outcomes-based” ranking, which takes into account the cities’ economic growth in job numbers, wages and salary, and the concentration and size of high-tech industries.

Milken Index Favors High-Tech Areas

Houston is responsible for a large amount of job growth in the nation, accounting for 5.9 percent of the total U.S. job growth between 2009 and 2013. Many of these jobs come from the fossil-fuel and information technology industries, but there has also been an increase of jobs in the fields of software development and medicine/health care.

The Milken Index is heavily weighted toward the performance of high-tech metropolitan areas. According to Richard Florida, co-founder and editor at large of The Atlantic Cities, two-sevenths of the index’s calculation is centered on the strength and growth of these industries, so the predominance of tech centers is not surprising.

“Technology and energy were the forces powering this year’s top performers, even more so than in 2012,” he wrote in an essay in Atlantic. 

Here is a list of the Milken Index’s top 10 “best performing” cities.