An expert in economic development sponsored by the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce tells Wichita there are no studies showing that incentives don’t work.
At a conference produced by Kansas Policy Institute on Friday September 19, a panel presented the “nuts and bolts” of the jobs portion of the proposed Wichita sales tax that voters will see on their November ballots. The Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce chose Jeff Finkle, president of the International Economic Development Council, to appear on a panel. Here’s part of what he told the Wichita Business Journal. He said similar things in his presentation.
Finkle was in town to present the argument for the jobs fund to the pro free-market Kansas Policy Institute on Friday.
And it was something of a surprise to him that he had to come help make such a pitch at all.
“This is the first place I’ve been where this hasn’t been considered a highly successful model,” Finkle told the WBJ.
Contrary to the stance of the Coalition For A Better Wichita — the group leading the charge against the sales tax referendum — that there are numerous studies that show incentives don’t work, Finkle said the opposite is true.
“I don’t know of one study that says incentives don’t work,” he said.
Finkle said there are studies that “nick” at certain parts of certain packages, but none to his knowledge that condemn the idea as a whole.
I can help Finkle update his knowledge of the literature of economic development. Here’s a paper from Michael J. Hicks, Ph.D., titled Why Tax Incentives Don’t Work: The Altered Landscape of Local Economic Development. Its abstract holds this: “I find that benefits to communities of traditional business attraction efforts have significantly declined over the past three or four decades, and are likely to continue to decline through the middle of this century.”
In fairness to Finkle, this paper is still in draft stage and was published on September 16, just three days before the Wichita conference.
One paper that’s been around a while is from Gabe and Kraybill in 2002 titled The Effect of State Economic Development Incentives on Employment Growth of Establishments. Its conclusion holds this: “Our analysis suggests that incentives do not substantially increase, and may even decrease slightly, the amount of employment change in the two years after an establishment launched an expansion. After controlling for other factors, we found that the effect of incentives on establishments that received incentives is a decrease of 10.5 jobs per establishment.” Another result was that firms that received incentives substantially overstated growth in employment.
The Gabe and Kraybill paper is just one of several mentioned in the brief literature review section of the Hicks paper. Here is a summary of some other peer-reviewed academic research that examines the local impact of targeted tax incentives from an empirical point of view. “Peer-reviewed” means these studies were stripped of identification of authorship and then subjected to critique by other economists, and were able to pass that review.
Ambrosius (1989). National study of development incentives, 1969 — 1985.
Finding: No evidence of incentive impact on manufacturing value-added or unemployment, thus suggesting that tax incentives were ineffective.
Trogan (1999). National study of state economic growth and development programs, 1979 — 1995.
Finding: General fiscal policy found to be mildly effective, while targeted incentives reduced economic performance (as measured by per capita income).
Fox and Murray (2004). Panel study of impacts of entry by 109 large firms in the 1980s.
Finding: No evidence of large firm impacts on local economy.
Edmiston (2004). Panel study of large firm entrance in Georgia, 1984 — 1998
Finding: Employment impact of large firms is less than gross job creation (by about 70%), and thus tax incentives are unlikely to be efficacious.
Hicks (2004). Panel study of gaming casinos in 15 counties (matched to 15 non-gambling counties).
Finding: No employment or income impacts associated with the opening of a large gambling facility. There is significant employment adjustment across industries.
LaFaive and Hicks (2005). Panel study of Michigan’s MEGA tax incentives, 1995 — 2004.
Finding: Tax incentives had no impact on targeted industries (wholesale and manufacturing), but did lead to a transient increase in construction employment at the cost of roughly $125,000 per job.
Hicks (2007a). Panel study of California’s EDA grants to Wal-Mart in the 1990s.
Finding: The receipt of a grant did increase the likelihood that Wal-Mart would locate within a county (about $1.2 million generated a 1% increase in the probability a county would receive a new Wal-Mart), but this had no effect on retail employment overall.
Hicks (2007b). Panel study of entry by large retailer (Cabela’s).
Finding: No permanent employment increase across a quasi-experimental panel of all Cabela’s stores from 1998 to 2003.
(Based on Figure 8.1: Empirical Studies of Large Firm Impacts and Tax Incentive Efficacy, in Unleashing Capitalism: Why Prosperity Stops at the West Virginia Border and How to Fix It, Russell S. Sobel, editor. Available here.)
Finally, Alan Peters and Peter Fisher, in their paper titled The Failures of Economic Development Incentives published in Journal of the American Planning Association, wrote on the effects of incentives. Their conclusion is this:
On the three major questions — Do economic development incentives create new jobs? Are those jobs taken by targeted populations in targeted places? Are incentives, at worst, only moderately revenue negative? — traditional economic development incentives do not fare well. It is possible that incentives do induce significant new growth, that the beneficiaries of that growth are mainly those who have greatest difficulty in the labor market, and that both states and local governments benefit fiscally from that growth. But after decades of policy experimentation and literally hundreds of scholarly studies, none of these claims is clearly substantiated. Indeed, as we have argued in this article, there is a good chance that all of these claims are false.
The most fundamental problem is that many public officials appear to believe that they can influence the course of their state or local economies through incentives and subsidies to a degree far beyond anything supported by even the most optimistic evidence. We need to begin by lowering their expectations about their ability to micromanage economic growth and making the case for a more sensible view of the role of government — providing the foundations for growth through sound fiscal practices, quality public infrastructure, and good education systems — and then letting the economy take care of itself.
I can allow that Jeff Finkle might disagree with these studies. He might have problems with the methodologies. Perhaps he doesn’t think that peer-reviewed research is reliable or valid.
But for him to tell Wichita “I don’t know of one study that says incentives don’t work” indicates either willful blindness or intentional deception. These studies don’t merely “nick” at incentives packages. Instead, they show that there are widespread and severe problems that have been discovered many times over many years.
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References:
Ambrosius, Margery Marzahn. 1989. The Effectiveness of State Economic Development Policies: A Time-Series Analysis. Western Political Quarterly 42:283-300.
Trogen, Paul. Which Economic Development Policies Work: Determinants of State Per Capita Income. 1999. International Journal of Economic Development 1.3: 256-279.
Gabe, Todd M., and David S. Kraybill. 2002. The Effect of State Economic Development Incentives on Employment Growth of Establishments. Journal of Regional Science 42(4): 703-730.
Fox, William F., and Matthew Murray. 2004. Do Economic Effects Justify the Use of Fiscal Incentives? Southern Economic Journal 71(1): 78-92.
Edmiston, Kelly D. 2004. The Net Effects of Large Plant Locations and Expansions on County Employment. Journal of Regional Science 44(2): 289-319.
Hicks, Michael J. 2004. A Quasi-Experimental Estimate of the Impact of Casino Gambling on the Regional Economy. Proceedings of the 93rd Annual Meeting of the National Tax Association.
LeFaivre, Michael and Michael Hicks 2005. MEGA: A Retrospective Assessment. Michigan:Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
Hicks, Michael J. 2007a. The Local Economic Impact of Wal-Mart. New York: Cambria Press.
Hicks, Michael J. 2007b. A Quasi-Experimental Test of Large Retail Stores’ Impacts on Regional Labor Markets: The Case of Cabela’s Retail Outlets. Journal of Regional Analysis and Policy, 37 (2):116-122.
In April Kansas Policy Institute commissioned SurveyUSA to conduct a scientific poll concerning current topics in Wichita. The press release from KPI, along with a link to the complete survey results, is available at Poll: Wichitans don’t want sales tax increase.
In January 2012, when Boeing announced it was leaving Wichita, people were not happy. 
