Comparison
Kentucky vs Mississippi
They differ most on labour market — Mississippi leads by 34 points. How tight the market is, and which way it moved last month.
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 — Kentucky ranks between 35 and 47 and Mississippi between 26 and 46. Mississippi is published ahead of Kentucky at 40 against 43, but 6,784 of those 20,000 weightings — 33.9% — put Kentucky 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
- 4579Labour market34 apart — Kentucky 45, Mississippi 79
- 5627Openness29 apart — Kentucky 56, Mississippi 27
- 5578Starting up23 apart — Kentucky 55, Mississippi 78
- 221Population health21 apart — Kentucky 22, Mississippi 1
- 5065Housing permits and prices15 apart — Kentucky 50, Mississippi 65
- 5642Productive base14 apart — Kentucky 56, Mississippi 42
- 7684Fiscal standing8 apart — Kentucky 76, Mississippi 84
- 71Prosperity6 apart — Kentucky 7, Mississippi 1
Tax structure
Kentucky
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Mississippi
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.