In our ranking of the economies of the states and DC, we looked at six measures of economic health.

Each measure was rescaled to allow us to compare them to one another. Technically, we calculated z-scores for each state on each measure, which rescales each variable based on its average and standard deviation.

To make the combined ranking, we added together the six indicator z-scores for each state to create an overall economic index.

Here are the sources for each of our measures: