Cool Tools and GSP

As both an analyst and as a coder, I'm always on the lookout for new and interesting applications being put online. On occasion, I come across some really incredible or just plain neat tools that are well worth sharing. Recently, in looking at a comparison of the economic performance of the older countries of the European Union (EU) versus individual states in the United States (US), I came across a neat tool from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, which allows you to create maps showing how much economic activity is generated in various industries in each state.

The following image, which was generated using the tool with some very minor editing to fit the Political Calculations^(TM) site layout, shows the states divided into five groups based upon their 2002 Gross State Product (GSP) - the state equivalent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP):

The application is really neat because you can also produce maps showing the contributions of various industries in the states to their Gross State Product. Want to create a map showing the state-by-state output of the textile industry in the US? Oil and gas extraction? Government spending? Try it out!

The weak point of this tool is that it doesn't necessarily offer the data you want. In this case, I was looking for data related to Gross State Product per Capita for each state. That meant some number crunching using an offline spreadsheet application. So after taking the individual GSP data for each state from the previous application, collecting the estimated state population data from the U.S. Census Bureau, and doing the math (dividing the GSP data by the population for each state), I produced a table that looked something like the table below.

The problem though is that if I wanted to rank the individual states by their raw GSP or their per capita GSP and present it online, I would have to create several different tables, which would make for some serious scrolling for the reader. Unless, of course, I used another cool application that would dynamically do the job of ranking the data from richest to poorest or vice versa. Try it out with the table below - you may rank the data either from least to greatest or greatest to least in the table below by clicking the individual column heads:

2002 U.S. Gross State Product and Population Data

State	GSP ($USD Millions)	Population	GSP per Capita ($USD)
Alabama	125567	4486508	27988
Alaska	29708	643786	46146
Arizona	171781	5456453	31482
Arkansas	71929	2710079	26541
California	1367785	35116033	38950
Colorado	179410	4506542	39811
Connecticut	165744	3460503	47896
Delaware	47150	807385	58398
District of Columbia	66440	570898	116378
Florida	520500	16713149	31143
Georgia	305829	8560310	35726
Hawaii	43998	1244898	35343
Idaho	38558	1341131	28750
Illinois	486139	12600620	38580
Indiana	204946	6159068	33275
Iowa	98232	2936760	33449
Kansas	89508	2715884	32957
Kentucky	122282	4092891	29877
Louisiana	131584	4482646	29354
Maine	39039	1294464	30158
Massachusetts	201879	5458137	36987
Maryland	288088	6427801	44819
Michigan	351287	10050446	34952
Minnesota	200061	5019720	39855
Mississippi	69136	2871782	24074
Missouri	187543	5672579	33061
Montana	23773	909453	26140
Nebraska	60962	1729180	35255
Nevada	81182	2173491	37351
New Hampshire	46448	1275056	36428
New Jersey	380169	8590300	44256
New Mexico	53515	1855059	28848
New York	792058	19157532	41344
North Carolina	300216	8320146	36083
North Dakota	19780	634110	31193
Ohio	388224	11421267	33991
Oklahoma	95126	3493714	27228
Oregon	115138	3521515	32696
Pennsylvania	428950	12335091	34775
Rhode Island	36988	1069725	34577
South Carolina	122354	4107183	29790
South Dakota	25003	761063	32853
Tennessee	190122	5797289	32795
Texas	773455	21779893	35512
Utah	72974	2316256	31505
Vermont	19604	616592	31794
Virginia	287589	7293542	39431
Washington	232940	6068996	38382
West Virginia	45518	1801873	25261
Wisconsin	190650	5441196	35038
Wyoming	20285	498703	40676

One item to note - in the table above, I originally used commas to separate the hundreds, thousands, millions, etc. in the format of the numbers presented. The table sorting function had problems with properly sorting the data with the commas in place, as well as any other separator I tried (spaces, periods, etc.), so the numbers are therefore presented without them.

Sources and Acknowledgements:

Gross State Product (GSP) Data: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis


2002 Population Estimate: U.S. Census Bureau


Table Sorting Function: The Daily Kryogenix