Comparison
Missouri vs Virginia
They differ most on prosperity — Virginia leads by 51 points. What the average person in the state actually earns.
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 — Missouri ranks between 5 and 24 and Virginia between 6 and 18. Virginia is published ahead of Missouri at 8 against 11, but 8,326 of those 20,000 weightings — 41.6% — put Missouri 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
- 3283Prosperity51 apart — Missouri 32, Virginia 83
- 8737Starting up50 apart — Missouri 87, Virginia 37
- 7630Labour market46 apart — Missouri 76, Virginia 30
- 3063Population health33 apart — Missouri 30, Virginia 63
- 6084Openness24 apart — Missouri 60, Virginia 84
- 4846Productive base2 apart — Missouri 48, Virginia 46
- 4947Housing permits and prices2 apart — Missouri 49, Virginia 47
- 100100Fiscal standinglevel — Missouri 100, Virginia 100
Tax structure
Missouri
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Virginia
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.