Toledo ranks as the fourth-most economically distressed city among the nation’s 100 largest cities, and it is the second worst in Ohio, according to a new study.

The study by the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington bipartisan entrepreneurial group, found that 44.2 percent of Toledoans, or 125,000 people, are living in economically distressed areas.

RELATED: Link to the Economic Innovation Group study

The group used an index with seven components, from the poverty rate to the housing vacancy rate to compile a level of economic distress experienced by each of the top 100 cities.

The methodology used for the study, released last week, differed slightly from that used for a preliminary study released in November that had ranked Toledo No. 14 among economically distressed cities.

“It’s not apples to apples. The first study was like a beta version,” said Steve Glickman, co-founder and executive director of the Economic Innovation Group.

Mr. Glickman said after talking to economists and other experts, the November study was tweaked to get a better view of unemployment and it also has more recent Census Bureau data.

“The new methodology we think is a much more accurate snapshot of the country,” Mr. Glickman said.

Relative to the rest of the country, Toledo “is doing worse than we thought,” he said.

Previously the group looked at a city’s unemployment rate, but Mr. Glickman said the new index looks at adults over the age of 16 who are not working. The new index captures people who have left the work force, which is a better number, he said.

Toledo did not measure too poorly in some of the seven components. A housing vacancy rate of 15 percent was “not terrible,” Mr. Glickman said, and no high school degree for 15 percent of the population also was not terribly high.

But the city fared poorly in the two employment measures and in poverty rate — 28 percent — and the median income ratio, at 69 percent, was too low. That means that only 69 percent of the people in Toledo earn the median income of Ohio, which for 2014 was $44,796.

But Mr. Glickman said the factor that hurt Toledo the most was change in the number of businesses, which was down 5 percent — the worst measure for that component for any of the top 100 cities. Measured between 2010 and 2014, it means that the number of businesses in Toledo decreased 5 percent.

“That’s a big problem. It becomes this downward spiral as it affects investment and city government loses its tax base,” he said. “It also usually means a lack of private investment. In some way, you have to incentivize businesses to bring them back.”

Toledo was ranked behind Cleveland, the most economically distressed large city in the nation, Detroit, and Newark. Cincinnati ranked as 10th-most distressed.

A surprising finding was that overall, Ohio as a state did not do badly and was in the middle in terms of economic distress. Yet it had three cities in the top 10 among the most distressed. That was because several of Ohio’s cities did poorly, but many parts of the state, including Columbus, fared well, Mr. Glickman said.

“We don’t have any other state that’s got three of the top 10,” he said.

One positive for Toledo is the distress is pretty evenly spread out and there isn’t much range between neighborhoods, which are measured by ZIP codes.

“There are some cities where you have extremely poor and extremely wealthy living side-by-side,” Mr. Glickman said.

What the study shows primarily is that cities like Toledo may be lacking access to capital, which can affect the city’s infrastructure as well as hurting its ability to attract businesses, Mr. Glickman said.

The group’s goal is to find ways to drive more private investment in cities like Toledo, so the study’s authors hope to use the information to get Congress to address the issues of such investments through policy changes in programs, such as modern versions of the old economic enterprise zones, Mr. Glickman said.

Contact Jon Chavez at: jchavez@theblade.com or 419-724-6128.

First Published March 1, 2016, 5:00 a.m.