States, Cities and the Marketplace of Municipal Economic Development Policy: How Institutions Shape Public Subsidies to Business

Abstract

The scholarly literature on economic development is replete with analysis of best practices, including how to lure businesses to one’s community or develop businesses that are already present; what kinds of tax and regulatory regimes are favorable to economic development; and how different types of local taxation affect the way in which land is used for economic development. Additionally, a broad swathe of literature in urban studies views local economic development through the prism of globalization and deregulation, and how these broader trends in the national and world economy limit the variety of policies that can be implemented locally.This paper will shed light on a more structural question that places politics ahead of economics – how the political and institutional context within which local government operates affects the scale and choice of economic development policy. State governments provide that context in the US, and their policies, laws and constitutions determine the level and type of taxes and state aid that local places depend upon, whether or not municipalities receive need-based financial support from their state government, and even the extent to which policy-making power is devolved to municipalities. This dynamic significantly impacts the extent to which local places must actively intervene in the marketplace to ensure healthy expansion of their tax base.Accordingly, the paper tests two key outcomes of economic development policy – the level of economic development spending, and the extent to which communities are channeling this spending in the form of direct assistance to business or business-related infrastructure – according to several key state and local policies that may impact such policy and spending levels. These explanatory variables include the presence and level of redistributive, need-based state aid to local government; the presence and level of revenue sharing from the state; the presence or absence of municipal and/or county sales taxes; the form of local government and variations in the state regime of economic development funding. In particular, the paper tests the hypothesis that communities in states with redistributive approaches to revenue sharing spend far less on economic development assistance to private business than those in states with more decentralized and traditional forms of funding local government.