Forbes: How Construction Tax Subsidies For Amazon Increase Employment (Hint, Not Much)
Two economics professors at the University of Wisconsin studied location Amazon location data from Subsidy Tracker to determine whether subsidies given to the retail giant had been effective in creating jobs.
They found little to support that, according to an article in Forbes:
“For each million dollars of subsidy, they found a 0.003% increase in employment, or 5.6 jobs in the initial year and no statistically significant number of jobs in future years. With an average subsidy amount of $16 million, that suggested an average employment increase of 0.048%. The subsidy cost per job was about $179,000.
In the counties they studied, the average job growth rate was 0.64%, or 13 times higher, which does raise the question of why anyone would bother to offer large subsidies as the incremental growth in jobs was so low.”
Read the full story at Forbes.
Read the full study by Ike Brannon and Matthew Winden here.