U.S. Regional Scorecard: Comparing U.S. Regions for Selected Economic Variables

Abstract

In this paper, the patterns of differences of some key economic variables among the four major U.S. regions are investigated. These four regions include: Northeast, Midwest, South and West. The grouping of individual U.S. states into these four regions is in accordance with the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Commerce classification. Two main points are explored in this study. The first one examined and summarized the descriptive statistics of the variables for states in these four regions. These variables and data were culled from the databases of U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, World Population Review and the U.S Department of Agriculture. The second one covered the identification of the four regions' similarities and dissimilarities for the identified variables. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) is the statistical tool for the testing hypothesis of four regions' means equality. To ascertain whether the regions that ranked the highest actually differ from another and from the remaining regions, the researcher made use of multiple comparison procedures, specifically the Scheffe test.