Comparison
Alaska vs Kentucky
They differ most on openness — Kentucky leads by 56 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 — Alaska ranks between 34 and 48 and Kentucky between 35 and 47. Kentucky is published ahead of Alaska at 43 against 44, but 9,130 of those 20,000 weightings — 45.6% — put Alaska 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
- 056Openness56 apart — Alaska 0, Kentucky 56
- 527Prosperity45 apart — Alaska 52, Kentucky 7
- 8855Starting up33 apart — Alaska 88, Kentucky 55
- 2645Labour market19 apart — Alaska 26, Kentucky 45
- 4756Productive base9 apart — Alaska 47, Kentucky 56
- 2922Population health7 apart — Alaska 29, Kentucky 22
- 4450Housing permits and prices6 apart — Alaska 44, Kentucky 50
- 7676Fiscal standinglevel — Alaska 76, Kentucky 76
Tax structure
Alaska
No individual income tax
Corporate income tax levied
Kentucky
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.