Making Sense of Incentives: Taming Business Incentives to Promote Prosperity

State and local policymakers regularly dangle tax breaks and other financial incentives as lures to attract and sometimes retain businesses and the jobs they say they’ll create. Oversight of these programs is often weak or nonexistent, yet tens of billions of taxpayer dollars are spent each year on these efforts. In the cases of Foxconn and Amazon, billions were offered for each project. Are these incentives worth the price? How do we know? Are they effective at promoting job growth? Is there a better way to grow good-paying jobs in a local labor market?
These questions and more are answered in this book by Timothy J. Bartik, the nation’s foremost authority on economic development incentives., The book is relatively brief, straightforward, nontechnical, and just what state and local policymakers need to read.
Bartik begins by explaining the basics: What are economic development incentives? Who offers them? Why are they offered? What are the political and economic considerations involved? Why are incentives often wasteful? He then delves into the recent trends in business incentives, including how generous offers have become and whether they threaten needed public services (especially K–12 education), which types of firms tend to receive incentives, and whether needy areas tend to be target
Policymakers often tout the multipliers associated with jobs created via business incentives—e.g., for every one job created another two jobs will appear as a result. But Bartik shows that these numbers are often specious, and why, while providing more realistic estimates.
Then, based on his decades of ground-breaking research, he explains what policymakers can do to improve the use of business incentives. Bartik doesn’t think incentives should be ruled out, just improved, and he explains how this can be achieved. And in his chapter on how to evaluate the success of incentive programs, he describes the program details that need to be considered, and how to use them, in order to judge whether the benefits of incentives exceed the costs.
Bartik goes on to describe what he sees as an ideal state incentives program, what the federal government’s role should be in overseeing state and local incentive programs, and a path forward for policymakers to follow.
Bartik concludes, “To promote broadly shared prosperity, incentives shouldn’t be eliminated. [They] should be tamed. This taming requires some cutbacks of what we currently know as incentives. It also requires reforms. Remaining incentives should be more short term and emphasize business services more. The incentive animal needs to go on a more nutritional diet. Only after such taming can incentives make sense. Only then can incentives help build prosperity for all.”