Colorado 2050: The Race to the Top!

We perform 360 review on the state of Colorado to analyze the strengths and weaknesses, and provides recommendations to aid policy makers to enhance the economic growth and development. Across all U.S. states, the overall ranking of Colorado is top 10 and in the economy matrix is top one. Yet, Colorado is lagging in other key matrices, such as Opportunity; Fiscal Stability; Crime & Corrections and Natural Environment. These weaknesses hurt minorities and disadvantage groups, thus we created a new index named as “Minorities ‘I can’t breathe’ index”, that measures how friendly is the state toward minorities and find Colorado to be above average at top 12. Colorado is bottom three (bottom 11) in the nation in education (income) gap by race. The study includes cross-sectional analyses across sectors and cities. Between 2010 and 2019, we find that the construction sector is the fastest growing sector (6.2%), while manufacturing is the slowest (1.8%); Fort Collin is the fastest earnings (3.4%), followed by Denver (3.2%), then Boulder (2.7%) and Colorado Springs (2.5%). Based on the socioeconomic of Colorado, our key recommendations to reach the top are to further investing in education to meet the rapid growth of minorities (the fraction of the Latino communities expected to reach 35% in 2050); our principal is that human capital is the medical to growth. In addition, we recommend a massive infrastructure investment (quadruple the current investment) and zero corporate income tax (recall, Taxes is our main competitor). Should these recommendations implemented, we project with high probabilities that Colorado will reach the top by 2050.