Comparison
New Mexico vs West Virginia
They differ most on openness — West Virginia leads by 27 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 — New Mexico ranks between 51 and 51 and West Virginia between 49 and 50. West Virginia is published ahead of New Mexico at 50 against 51, but 504 of those 20,000 weightings — 2.5% — put New Mexico 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
- 027Openness27 apart — New Mexico 0, West Virginia 27
- 2638Labour market12 apart — New Mexico 26, West Virginia 38
- 131Prosperity12 apart — New Mexico 13, West Virginia 1
- 3430Starting up4 apart — New Mexico 34, West Virginia 30
- 1921Productive base2 apart — New Mexico 19, West Virginia 21
- 6563Housing permits and prices2 apart — New Mexico 65, West Virginia 63
- 2322Population health1 apart — New Mexico 23, West Virginia 22
- 8484Fiscal standinglevel — New Mexico 84, West Virginia 84
Tax structure
New Mexico
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
West 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.