Wednesday, May 21, 2014

The Uselessness of Economic Development Incentives

http://www.citylab.com/work/2012/12/uselessness-economic-development-incentives/4081/

The author argues in this article that the incentives that these states, cities, and counties are giving to these companies are a waste of money because it isn't an effective mechanism to lure these companies into choosing them. This comes into the perceptive of the previous article, sometimes incentives can pause the economic development and improvement of a company. In other words these incentives weren’t benefiting anyone at the end. The only correlation that they were able to find is that the communities that provided these incentives to companies were the ones that were economically in need. While incentives in the business world can work, it can also backfire. The incentives have to be hand in hand. In the end if these communities do not have the qualities or resources that these companies need in order to succeed their contributions go to waste.

            Incentives are almost always involved when making business decisions. In the case stated in this article I believe that the states, cities, and counties funds are being depleted if they do not have the resources these companies need. In order for one to offer incentives one has to be sure that they have other qualities to offer that can help the other party in the long run. In the case of these communities it is hard to say whether their incentives were going to waste or not because of the lack of information on their economic state and resource’s available. In their case they are giving incentives at their own risk. On the other hand for the company it can be just like the article stated above. The more revenue these companies see coming in the less work they put into improving themselves economically. This in turn causes no employment growth in the long run. Incentives are to be used wisely. 

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