Comparison
Ohio vs Pennsylvania
They differ most on openness — Pennsylvania leads by 71 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.
This ordering turns on the weighting
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 — Ohio ranks between 20 and 40 and Pennsylvania between 26 and 44. Ohio is published ahead of Pennsylvania at 32 against 32, but 8,313 of those 20,000 weightings — 41.6% — put Pennsylvania first. The ordering of these two is a property of the weighting as much as of the states. Read the pillars below instead: those are measured, and the weighting does not touch them.
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
- 071Openness71 apart — Ohio 0, Pennsylvania 71
- 6226Housing permits and prices36 apart — Ohio 62, Pennsylvania 26
- 2559Prosperity34 apart — Ohio 25, Pennsylvania 59
- 6736Labour market31 apart — Ohio 67, Pennsylvania 36
- 5930Starting up29 apart — Ohio 59, Pennsylvania 30
- 3655Population health19 apart — Ohio 36, Pennsylvania 55
- 6951Productive base18 apart — Ohio 69, Pennsylvania 51
- 9276Fiscal standing16 apart — Ohio 92, Pennsylvania 76
Tax structure
Ohio
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Pennsylvania
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.