Comparison
Arkansas vs West Virginia
They differ most on starting up — Arkansas leads by 28 points. How many businesses get founded here, and what the state takes in tax.
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 — Arkansas ranks between 45 and 49 and West Virginia between 49 and 50. Arkansas is published ahead of West Virginia at 49 against 50, but 544 of those 20,000 weightings — 2.7% — put West Virginia 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
- 5830Starting up28 apart — Arkansas 58, West Virginia 30
- 027Openness27 apart — Arkansas 0, West Virginia 27
- 4621Productive base25 apart — Arkansas 46, West Virginia 21
- 1122Population health11 apart — Arkansas 11, West Virginia 22
- 7263Housing permits and prices9 apart — Arkansas 72, West Virginia 63
- 9284Fiscal standing8 apart — Arkansas 92, West Virginia 84
- 71Prosperity6 apart — Arkansas 7, West Virginia 1
- 3738Labour market1 apart — Arkansas 37, West Virginia 38
Tax structure
Arkansas
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.