The PG Benchmarks results for 16 economic indicators and 15 regions are
presented below:
Rankings have become a popular -- and expected -- way of depicting the
relative performance of regions. But rankings can be quite misleading, as they fail to
convey the distance between ranks. For example, a fourth-place baseball team in a
five-team division sounds like a poor performer. But, that team could be only one game out
of first place in a division where the top four teams are equally good and the last-place
team is terrible.
To provide a more meaningful representation, we are using the following
method to depict the distribution of each region's score in each category on a
standardized basis.
Standardizing the raw data offers a way of comparing data, where some
categories are described in dollars per capita, others as percent change and others as
indexes.
We standardized the raw data by subtracting the average (across regions)
in each category from the individual region's score, then dividing by the standard
deviation for that series of scores.
The standardized scores range between 75 and 135. The standardization
assumes that each category follows a uniform distribution around 100 -- that the scores
will tend to cluster around 100.
Note that the latest available data for University Research and
Development are from 1998.
