Comparison
Iowa vs South Dakota
They differ most on openness — Iowa leads by 42 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 — Iowa ranks between 8 and 26 and South Dakota between 7 and 26. South Dakota is published ahead of Iowa at 12 against 15, but 8,633 of those 20,000 weightings — 43.2% — put Iowa 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
- 6018Openness42 apart — Iowa 60, South Dakota 18
- 2657Prosperity31 apart — Iowa 26, South Dakota 57
- 3558Starting up23 apart — Iowa 35, South Dakota 58
- 4770Labour market23 apart — Iowa 47, South Dakota 70
- 5028Population health22 apart — Iowa 50, South Dakota 28
- 6863Productive base5 apart — Iowa 68, South Dakota 63
- 8177Housing permits and prices4 apart — Iowa 81, South Dakota 77
- 100100Fiscal standinglevel — Iowa 100, South Dakota 100
Tax structure
Iowa
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
South Dakota
No individual income tax
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.