Incentives to Pander

Nathan M. Jensen is Professor of Government at the University of Texas, Austin. His research focusses on government economic development strategies, firm non-market strategies and business-government relations, as well as the politics of oil and natural resources, political risk in emerging markets, trade policy, and international institutions. Edmund J. Malesky is a Professor of Political Economy and the Associate Chair of the Political Science Department at Duke University, North Carolina. He is a noted specialist in economic development, authoritarian institutions, and comparative political economy in Vietnam and has published extensively in leading political science and economic journals.

• 1. Introduction: the global competition for capital meets local politics; 2. A theory of the political use of investment incentives; 3. Incentives and the competition for investment within countries and around the world; 4. The economic case against investment incentives; 5. Economic or political competition? Allocation and oversight of US incentives; 6. Money for money: campaign contributions in exchange for financial incentives?; 7. Political pandering in the United States: a survey experiment on incentives and investment; 8. Pandering upward: tax incentives and credit claiming in authoritarian countries; 9. The distributional effects of investment incentives; 10. Potential policy solutions to the pandering problem; 11. Final thoughts.

'The puzzle of investment incentives like tax breaks and regulatory exemptions is that although they are generally inefficient, governments around the world - from Kansas to Vietnam - use them to attract investors. In this provocative and wide-ranging book, Jensen and Malesky show that politicians choose these policies because they reap political benefits from doing so. By identifying the political logic that drives inefficient policies, this book reveals how citizens may press for better policymaking.' Thomas Pepinsky, Cornell University, New York