Pew’s Economic Development Incentive Evaluation Toolkit Designed to Help States

A toolkit assembled by The Pew Charitable Trusts in 2024 can help state policymakers, policy analysts, and the public better understand the economic development incentives offered by their states and how they might be made to work better. Pew hosted a webinar to introduce the toolkit.

As part of the June program, Pew experts provided an overview of more than a decade of research on evaluating such incentives and introduced a curated database with materials categorized by state or locality studied and by subject matter. The materials include reports, webinars, technical guidance, legislative testimonies, memoranda, and research presentations from Pew and partners focused on how to set up recurring evaluation processes, methods for analyzing incentive effectiveness, and best practices for incentive design.

Pew’s work on this subject has helped states evaluate the effectiveness of their economic development incentives, which collectively cost billions of dollars each year. No matter how comfortable policymakers are in evaluating these programs, they can turn to these resources to inform their policy decisions.

Logan Timmerhoff works with The Pew Charitable Trusts’ state fiscal health project.