While the economy certainly doesn’t feel like it’s growing when you’re staring blankly at the grocery aisle thinking back to the yonder days of cheaper bread, the U.S. Department of Commerce says the economy grew faster than expected in 2023.
But what about the Illinois economy? Is the state’s economy growing along with the rest of the country? One new report says no.
More:RFK Jr. files papers to run as independent presidential candidate in Illinois
Methodology
In order to determine the best state economies, WalletHub, a personal finance website, compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across three key dimensions:
- Economic Activity
- Economic Health
- Innovation Potential
The researchers at WalletHub broke those three key categories into 28 different metrics each weighted from one to 100 by relevance toward pushing the economy forward. Each category could garner up to 33.3 points for a maximum state score of 100, representing the highest economic performance.
Metrics that weighed the heaviest on the ranking scale included change in GDP from 2022 to 2023, and the number of firms in the Deloitte Fast 500 List. The full list of metrics can be found on the study website, with an interactive map.
Where Illinois falls
Illinois earned a score of 38.50, which was good enough to rank 39th. The breakdown of the score comes from the state’s rankings in the three categories.
- Economic Activity: 28 out of 51
- Economic Health: 51 out of 51
- Innovational Potential: 26 out of 51
The Prairie State ranked worst out of all states in economic health and below average in the other two categories.
The report weighted economic health by the unemployment rate in the state, share of population in poverty, changes to nonfarm payroll jobs, the change in civilian labor forces and median annual household income.
Several other factors that played a smaller role in the score, including the amount of uninsured people in the state. Uninsured coverage, however, has been slowly dropping in Illinois from 7% in 2021 to 6.6% in 2022, according to Census.gov.
More:Illinois gas tax is set to increase on July 1. Here’s what to know
Top 10 best state economies
- Washington, 71.10 out of 100
- Utah, 62 out of 100
- Massachusetts, 61.52 out of 100
- Texas, 60.08 out of 100
- California, 59.63 out of 100
- Colorado, 58.89 out of 100
- Florida, 55.75 out of 100
- North Carolina, 55.08 out of 100
- District of Columbia, 54.15 out of 100
- Arizona, 53.69 out of 100
Top 5 worst state economies
47. Louisiana, 32.60 out of 100
48. Arkansas, 31.77 out of 100
49. West Virginia, 31.13 out of 100
50. Hawaii, 29.79 out of 100
51 Mississippi, 26.67 out of 100
Claire Grant writes about business, growth and development and other news topics for The State Journal-Register. She can be reached at CLGrant@gannett.com; and on X (Formerly known as Twitter): @Claire_Granted
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