Comparison
Colorado vs Montana
They differ most on openness — Colorado leads by 61 points. Whether the state publishes in a form a machine can read: an open-data portal that answers; incentive, permit and finance records as data; and newsroom feeds.
No defensible weighting reverses this ordering
The 8 pillars are averaged equally, which is declared rather than tuned. 20,000 other weightings were drawn and the whole table re-ranked under each; restricted to the ones a person could defend — every pillar between 6.25% and 25% of the total — Colorado ranks between 1 and 3 and Montana between 20 and 42. Colorado finishes above Montana in every one of those 20,000 weightings — not one reverses it — so on this pair the ordering is a result rather than an artefact of the equal weighting.
875 of the 1,275 possible pairings of these 51 jurisdictions are reversed by some defensible weighting. Most comparisons a reader can build on this site do not have a defensible ordering, and the ones that do are worth more than the rank beside them.
Pillar by pillar, widest divergence first
- 610Openness61 apart — Colorado 61, Montana 0
- 4911Productive base38 apart — Colorado 49, Montana 11
- 8953Prosperity36 apart — Colorado 89, Montana 53
- 7146Population health25 apart — Colorado 71, Montana 46
- 8970Starting up19 apart — Colorado 89, Montana 70
- 6877Labour market9 apart — Colorado 68, Montana 77
- 4855Housing permits and prices7 apart — Colorado 48, Montana 55
- 9292Fiscal standinglevel — Colorado 92, Montana 92
Tax structure
Colorado
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Montana
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Census Bureau, Annual Survey of State Government Tax Collections. Where a state levies no such tax the survey records it, and so does this — the absence is a fact, not a gap.