IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/edn/sirdps/63.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Relative Efficiency of Automatic and Discretionary Industrial Aid

Author

Listed:
  • Swales, J. Kim

Abstract

For the last two decades, the primary instruments for UK regional policy have been discretionary subsidies. Such aid is targeted at additional projects - projects that would not have been implemented without the subsidy - and the subsidy should be the minimum necessary for the project to proceed. Discretionary subsidies are thought to be more efficient than automatic subsidies, where many of the aided projects are non-additional and all projects receive the same subsidy rate. The present paper builds on Swales (1995) and Wren (2007a) to compare three subsidy schemes: an automatic scheme and two types of discretionary scheme, one with accurate appraisal and the other with appraisal error. These schemes are assessed on their expected welfare impacts. The particular focus is the reduction in welfare gain imposed by the interaction of appraisal error and the requirements for accountability. This is substantial and difficult to detect with conventional evaluation techniques.

Suggested Citation

  • Swales, J. Kim, 2008. "The Relative Efficiency of Automatic and Discretionary Industrial Aid," SIRE Discussion Papers 2008-50, Scottish Institute for Research in Economics (SIRE).
    • Handle: RePEc:edn:sirdps:63
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10943/63
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Criscuolo, Chiara & Martin, Ralf & Overman, Henry & Van Reenen, John, 2012. "The Causal Effects of an Industrial Policy," IZA Discussion Papers 6323, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Kim Swales, 1997. "A cost-benefit approach to the evaluation of regional selective assistance," Fiscal Studies, Institute for Fiscal Studies, vol. 18(1), pages 73-85, February.
    3. D. Evans & E. Kula & H. Sezer, 2005. "Regional welfare weights for the UK: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland," Regional Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 39(7), pages 923-937.
    4. Gary Gillespie & Peter Mcgregor & J. Kim Swales & Ya Ping Yin, 2001. "The Displacement and Multiplier Effects of Regional Selective Assistance: A Computable General Equilibrium Analysis," Regional Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 35(2), pages 125-139.
    5. Grossman, Sanford J & Hart, Oliver D, 1983. "An Analysis of the Principal-Agent Problem," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 51(1), pages 7-45, January.
    6. Eric Mcvittie & J. Kim Swales, 2007. "'Constrained Discretion' in UK Monetary and Regional Policy," Regional Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 41(2), pages 267-280.
    7. Holden, Darryl R & Swales, J K, 1995. "The Additionality, Displacement and Substitution Effects of Factor Subsidies," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 42(2), pages 113-126, May.
    8. Colin Wren, 2007. "Reconciling Practice with Theory in the Micro-Evaluation of Regional Policy," International Review of Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 21(3), pages 321-337.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. J Kim Swales, 2010. "The Relative Efficiency of Automatic and Discretionary Regional Aid," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 42(2), pages 434-451, February.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. J Kim Swales, 2010. "The Relative Efficiency of Automatic and Discretionary Regional Aid," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 42(2), pages 434-451, February.
    2. Psaltopoulos, Demetrios & Skuras, Dimitris & Thomson, Kenneth J., 2011. "Employment effects of private investment initiatives in rural areas of southern Europe: A regional SAM approach," Agricultural Economics Review, Greek Association of Agricultural Economists, vol. 12(2).
    3. Gancarczyk, Marta, . "Ocena publicznej i prywatnej formy świadczenia usług dla przedsiębiorców w Małopolsce," Gospodarka Narodowa-The Polish Journal of Economics, Szkoła Główna Handlowa w Warszawie / SGH Warsaw School of Economics, vol. 2009(5-6).
    4. Marta Gancarczyk, 2009. "Ocena publicznej i prywatnej formy świadczenia usług dla przedsiębiorców w Małopolsce," Gospodarka Narodowa. The Polish Journal of Economics, Warsaw School of Economics, issue 5-6, pages 91-111.
    5. Calcagno, R. & Renneboog, L.D.R., 2004. "Capital Structure and Managerial Compensation : The Effects of Renumeration Seniority," Discussion Paper 2004-120, Tilburg University, Center for Economic Research.
    6. Bruinshoofd Allard & Kool Clemens, 2002. "The Determinants of Corporate Liquidity in the Netherlands," Research Memorandum 014, Maastricht University, Maastricht Research School of Economics of Technology and Organization (METEOR).
    7. Resende Filho, Moises de Andrade, 2007. "A Principal-Agent Model for Investigating Traceability Systems Incentives on Food Safety," 105th Seminar, March 8-10, 2007, Bologna, Italy 7897, European Association of Agricultural Economists.
    8. Atasi Basu & Randal Elder & Mohamed Onsi, 2012. "Reported earnings, auditor's opinion, and compensation: theory and evidence," Accounting and Business Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 42(1), pages 29-48, March.
    9. Anil Aswani & Zuo-Jun Max Shen & Auyon Siddiq, 2019. "Data-Driven Incentive Design in the Medicare Shared Savings Program," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 67(4), pages 1002-1026, July.
    10. Gibbons, Stephen & Overman, Henry & Sarvimäki, Matti, 2021. "The local economic impacts of regeneration projects: Evidence from UK's single regeneration budget," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 122(C).
    11. Sebastian Koehne & Nicola Pavoni & Arpad Abraham, 2011. "Optimal Income Taxation with Asset Accumulation," 2011 Meeting Papers 1161, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    12. Rafal M. Wojakowski & M. Shahid Ebrahim & Aziz Jaafar & Murizah Osman Salleh, 2019. "Can Loan Valuation Adjustment (LVA) approach immunize collateralized debt from defaults?," Financial Markets, Institutions & Instruments, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 28(2), pages 141-158, May.
    13. Qiao Wang, 2023. "Does the Chinese labour force make sufficient efforts? Empirical evidence using non‐parametric analysis," International Journal of Finance & Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 28(3), pages 3262-3280, July.
    14. Nafziger, Julia, 2009. "Timing of information in agency problems with hidden actions," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 45(11), pages 751-766, December.
    15. Anil Arya & Jonathan Glover & Pierre Jinghong Liang, 2004. "Intertemporal aggregation and incentives," European Accounting Review, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 13(4), pages 643-657.
    16. Cai, W. & Singham, D.I., 2018. "A principal–agent problem with heterogeneous demand distributions for a carbon capture and storage system," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 264(1), pages 239-256.
    17. Ohad Kadan & Philip J. Reny & Jeroen M. Swinkels, 2017. "Existence of Optimal Mechanisms in Principal‐Agent Problems," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 85, pages 769-823, May.
    18. Canice Prendergast, 2000. "The Tenuous Tradeoff Between Risk and Incentives," NBER Working Papers 7815, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    19. Marco Zanobio, 2012. "Aspetti teorici della Corporate Governance," DISEIS - Quaderni del Dipartimento di Economia internazionale, delle istituzioni e dello sviluppo dis1202, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimento di Economia internazionale, delle istituzioni e dello sviluppo (DISEIS).
    20. Enrico Vanino & Stephen Roper & Bettina Becker, 2020. "Knowledge to Money: Assessing the Business Performance Effects of Publicly Funded R&D Grants," ifo DICE Report, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, vol. 17(04), pages 20-24, January.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • R13 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - General Equilibrium and Welfare Economic Analysis of Regional Economies
    • R38 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Real Estate Markets, Spatial Production Analysis, and Firm Location - - - Government Policy
    • R58 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Regional Government Analysis - - - Regional Development Planning and Policy
    • D61 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Allocative Efficiency; Cost-Benefit Analysis

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:edn:sirdps:63. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Research Office (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sireeuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.