Comparison
Colorado vs Wyoming
They differ most on openness — Colorado leads by 43 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.
No defensible weighting reverses this ordering
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 — Colorado ranks between 1 and 3 and Wyoming between 12 and 30. Colorado finishes above Wyoming in every one of those 20,000 weightings — not one reverses it — so on this pair the ordering is a result rather than an artefact of the equal weighting.
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
- 6118Openness43 apart — Colorado 61, Wyoming 18
- 7136Population health35 apart — Colorado 71, Wyoming 36
- 8957Prosperity32 apart — Colorado 89, Wyoming 57
- 8972Starting up17 apart — Colorado 89, Wyoming 72
- 4862Housing permits and prices14 apart — Colorado 48, Wyoming 62
- 4942Productive base7 apart — Colorado 49, Wyoming 42
- 6869Labour market1 apart — Colorado 68, Wyoming 69
- 9292Fiscal standinglevel — Colorado 92, Wyoming 92
Tax structure
Colorado
Individual income tax levied
Corporate income tax levied
Wyoming
No individual income tax
No corporate income tax
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.