Becoming Competitive: How Policymakers View Incentive-Based Development Policy

Harold Wolman (1988) examined the question of why local politicians and officials decide to offer development incentives to firms when the literature challenges the economic rationality of such decisions. He concluded that "very little systematic information exists on how public officials think about local economic development and how they make policy decisions in that realm" (p. 27). This article's purpose is to supply the kind of "systematic information" about economic development that Wolman feels is missing from the development literature. Toward that end, this article will use interview data to examine how one group of officials explain their decisions to offer firms tax abatements through Ohio '5 enterprise zone program.