Description
The recent restructuring of California's Enterprise Zone program illuminates the ongoing debate over the effectiveness of economic development programs that are funded through tax expenditures. The current literature on Enterprise Zones does not provide a full picture of the impacts of these programs because the literature focuses on certain outcomes of tax expenditure programs, such as employment rates and business retention, and not on the fiscal effects to local governments. Tax expenditure programs were investigated to understand their effect on local government revenues to establish a research framework that begins to analyze these programs' effects more accurately. Then the various Enterprise Zone programs in California and Florida were analyzed to determine how tax expenditures provided through these programs affect the property tax and sales tax revenues of the local governments located in these geographically-targeted programs. This research first investigated cities located in Enterprise Zones and compared the average trend of these two financial indicators against comparable cities in the same state that are not in Enterprise Zones. This research found that the average trend of sales and property tax revenues increased at a higher rate for cities with an Enterprise Zone than those without, even when controlling for differences in population. Then linear regression analysis was utilized to quantify the value of tax expenditures provided to local governments. The regression analyses focused on identifying the marginal increase on sales and property tax revenues from a dollar change in tax expenditures provided by the Enterprise Zone programs. This research found that for California, increases in tax expenditures provided by the state's Enterprise Zone program positively impacted the property and sales tax revenues of local governments, while Florida's Enterprise Zone program demonstrated a negative impact on property and sales tax revenues for local governments.
