In With the New: Reflections on and Key Takeaways From the 2024 Roundtable

The 2024 NCSL Roundtable on Evaluating Economic Development Tax Incentives revisited some important topics from the past while also focusing on methods and practices that have not been spotlighted during previous roundtables. Right out of the gate, the Roundtable provided informative discussion about the important considerations and challenges of modeling economic development incentive impacts with regional economic development models (e. g., IMPLAN and REMI). I never grow tired of hearing from other incentive evaluators about the challenges and benefits of using regional economic models and learning how they used them to evaluate incentive program impacts.

The Roundtable also initiated discussion of assessing the methods and processes used for incentive evaluations. The session highlighted reflections by evaluators on the performance of their incentive evaluation programs and the challenges of creating valid and informative approaches for examining the impact that evaluators are having on incentive policy in their states.

There were two key takeaways from this session. First, start an evaluation by using a logic model to describe and explore the full scope of an incentive program, from program mission and inputs to program outputs and outcomes. Second, use a scorecard to rate incentives against recognized best practices—for example, minimum eligibility thresholds, wage requirements, incentive cap, or provisions targeting distressed areas.

Three new topics introduced at the Roundtable yielded considerable takeaways:

• Using artificial intelligence for incentive evaluations.
• Going beyond economic indicators to evaluate incentive programs.
• Causal analysis of incentive program effects using the synthetic control method.