Posts Tagged Transparency

Good Jobs First’s latest tally of economic development subsidies given to Amazon.com finds state and local governments have given the retail behemoth more than $3.7 billion. How much more is becoming increasingly hard to tell.

South Carolina is a state that’s given large subsidies to big companies – Boeing, Michelin, Volvo, Continental Tire, Google to name a few – and it’s also been one of the worst in the country when it comes to revealing the full costs of those deals.

by Jennifer Morgan

Tracking how states provide incentives for economic development sometimes can be as simple as searching their online reporting platform. Localities, however, often make it difficult to find information on their subsidy recipients. They either require this data be accessed through an open records request, which is burdensome, or they bounce the request from department to department, and eventually decline to disclose.