[fiamme red]

From an op-ed by Richard Florida in today's Daily News:

...Across the country, states, cities and counties give away tens of billions of dollars in incentives to entice companies to move into their jurisdictions every year.

My own research shows that there is virtually no association between these economic development initiatives and any measure of economic performance. They are not associated with higher wages, greater shares of knowledge workers or lower unemployment rates. The broad body of evidence suggests that they do not even cause companies to choose certain locations over others.

Companies typically know exactly where they want to locate in advance. Then, they pick a few other prospective locations and pit them against one another so they can extract the best deal.

As often as not, companies would have located where they did without any incentives at all, so the net result is simply to shrink the localities’ tax bases.

Even worse, since smaller cities are often the most willing to deal, the places that can least afford it are paying the most and getting very little in return...