The Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) has a new report on North Carolina’s on the state’s Economic Development Inventory. CFED rightly lauds the inventory as a helpful step in making state incentives transparent. The author’s main suggestion is for the state to build on the inventory with a Unified Development Budget with details on how economic development money is spent.
A unified budget would be particularly useful if it provided a better definition of tax preferences, which have gone from 77 percent of the development budget in 1996 to 90 percent in 2007, according to CFED.
To get a complete picture, that budget would also need to include Golden LEAF money, which often supplements and supplants state incentives in the Global Trans Park and elsewhere.
