General Electric is moving its global headquarters from Connecticut to Boston

The new headquarters will be in the city’s Seaport District, a hotbed of high-tech start-ups and venture capital firms, and surrounded by 55 colleges and universities, many with elite reputations in the computer and software fields.

The company publicized its frustrations with CT in June, when state lawmakers approved a two-year, $40 billion budget that raised levies on businesses and wealthy individuals. GE’s headquarters had been located in the state for the past 42 years, but the company chose to form a committee to find a new home.

GE already has almost 5,000 employees across the state in such business lines as Aviation, Oil & Gas and Energy Management. Incentives will be made available once GE makes its final site selection: The city could offer up to $20 million in property tax relief over 20 years, while state incentives could reach $120 million and include help with real estate acquisition costs, infrastructure improvements, and tax incentives.

On Wednesday, the company said that it is going to sell the 68-acre Fairfield campus and two floors of offices that were with it for executives at Rockefeller Center in New York City. It will move to temporary quarters by next summer, and permanently settle about 800 workers in the Seaport district by 2018, GE said.

“Where it’s less quantifiable is all the other areas – the volunteer hours from GE employees, the shopping they do in Fairfield, the dining out”, said Tetreau.

That decision makes Boston the victor of an intense competition among dozens of cities – all hoping to become the hometown of one of the world’s largest companies.

The content of GE’s headquarters will also change, the company said, with more emphasis on innovation.

CT ranks near the bottom in the Tax Foundation’s annual list of state business tax climates.

About 800 GE employees will work in the Boston headquarters – majority digital industrial product managers. “Unfortunately most small businesses in our state do not have the resources that General Electric does and their only alternative is to close up their shops permanently”, NFIB Connecticut state director Andrew Markowski said in a statement on Wednesday. But it’s not totally clear what happens to the 600 other CT employees.

“The business environment here has declined so precipitously”, LeClair said.

GE is attempting to position itself as a “digital industrial” company by expanding a business providing data analytical capabilities for its heavy-duty equipment.

“I think GE is a positive for Worcester”, Murray told Worcester Magazine.

While some have suggested the company’s decision would likely take into account the state’s long-term liabilities and fiscal stability, Godfrey said he didn’t buy it. “It just doesn’t make any sense to me”, he said. GE has been extremely successful, over many decades, running its business out of Fairfield, but it made a decision to go in a different direction. NY officials were still trying to seal a deal with GE in recent days, according to people familiar with the matter, but the state’s pitch faced other hurdles, including higher personal income-tax rates.

Some Democrats brushed aside criticism of the state’s tax policy by pointing out that MA has combined unitary reporting, the very tax policy CT stepped away from in a second budget negotiation. He said the relocation has “nothing to do with taxes or even business costs and shouldn’t be seen as a referendum on Connecticut’s economy”.