Partial-order analysis of fiscal capacity of states

Abstract

A methodology for partially ordering a set of multivariate observations is introduced. The method depends on an iterative reapplication of singular value decomposition (SVD) to partition the data into simply ordered subsets. Five measures of the fiscal capacity of states are analyzed to decide whether a majority can be simply ordered. Partial-order analysis uncovers a group of 38 states which can be simply ordered, a second group of five which can also be simply ordered, but not with the other 38. The remaining eight have no simply-ordered subgroup.