Willingness to pay for industrial recruitment: A look at local decision-maker activity versus citizen preference

Academic research in the area of economic development policy is overwhelmingly critical of industrial recruitment, recommending instead that resources be directed towards strategies such as business retention and expansion, fostering local entrepreneurship, and amenity development. This research moves beyond criticizing industrial recruitment policy and explores one potential reason, a high discount rate, for practitioners' reliance on recruitment over other available local development techniques. The research also investigates developer's probability of success for industrial recruitment as well as alternative development strategies and examines whether economic developer use of incentive packages to recruit local businesses is a rational decision, i.e., supported by the general public. Contingent valuation methods estimate discount rates of local economic developers from Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia using a mail survey while West Virginia citizens were surveyed by phone.

Name thesis:degree_name

MS

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Agricultural and Resource Economics

Year dc:date.available

1998

Author dc:creator

• Loy, Beth Ann

Contributors dc:contributor

• Scott Loveridge.

• Labor economics
• Commerce-Business
• Political science

Identifier

https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/896

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:researchrepository.wvu.edu:etd-1899