What is the best enterprise planning tool?

Urban and Regional Planning: How do enterprise zones encourage local economic development?

• For example in California: The Enterprise Zone (EZ) program targets economically distressed areas in California with special state and local incentives which encourage business investment and promote the creation of new jobs. The Enterprise Zone program provides tax incentives to businesses and allows private sector market forces to revive the local economy. There are currently 42 EZs in California. http://jobsandsafecommunities.com/about/enterprise-zones-proven-job-creators/

• Answer:

  Hmmm, not really.  Both California and Texas have Enterprise Zone projects and the effects on raising the employment rate and bringing in new businesses to these zones has been minimal at best. According to a study done by Jed Kolko and David Neumark of the Public Policy Institute of California California’s enterprise zone program—the state’s largest economic development program—has no statistically significant effect on employment. We arrived at this conclusion after mapping nearly all businesses in the state, drawing precise enterprise zone boundaries, and comparing employment growth in enterprise zones with carefully considered control areas. http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_609JKR.pdf The State of Texas has had similar results.  According to a audit done by the State Auditing Office of Texas Certified actual job creation by designated projects has occurred in 21 Texas counties. In 7 of the 21 counties, the number of jobs created amounts to less than 0.1 percent of the total labor force. While 29.8 percent of the jobs created have been in 2 of the 10 Texas counties with the highest rates of unemployment, there has been no certified actual job creation in the other 8. Job creation by designated projects has had a measurable impact in four Texas counties. http://www.sao.state.tx.us/reports/main/95-005.pdf The program has also not been effective in getting businesses to relocate State incentives offered to projects are relatively minor compared to local incentives. In fiscal year 1992, state incentives accounted for 2.4 percent ofthe $62.5 million in incentives provided to designated projects by the State and local governments. The majority of designated projects have not claimed any benefits under the Program. Of the 132 projects designated in the six years ofthe Program's operation, only 39 (or 29.5 percent) had received sales tax rebates, and only 19 (or 14.4 percent) had received franchise tax reduction. http://www.sao.state.tx.us/reports/main/95-005.pdf The California study does have some suggestions on how to improve their program Two relatively small changes to the program would make future evaluation and administration of the program much more simple. The first would be to require that local zone administrators and applicants create digitized maps of their zones using GIS software. GIS maps can be read with standard mapping software and overlaid with data from the U.S. Census, the NETS, and other sources. The second change would be to require that enterprise zones follow Census tract boundaries. This would make it easier to analyze and control for demographic and other characteristics when selecting new zones or evaluating existing ones. It would also make zone boundaries more definitive. Currently, conflicting information in different maps and street lists leads to some cases of ambiguity about whether individual streets are part of an enterprise zone. Taken together, these two recommendations—requiring digitized maps and following Census tract boundaries— would allow local administrators, local businesses, and HCD to definitively analyze the demographics and other characteristics of zones, so long as the Census continues to produce usable tract-level data.47 These improvements would aid HCD in the selection and evaluation processes and could help local administrators work with businesses to visualize and market the zone. http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/report/R_609JKR.pdf I'm not sure exactly how useful these changes would be, however.  Here in San Antonio we have a local professor who is a GIS Specialist working with the zone, but the program is sluggish at best even though it has been one of the more successful programs in the state. I suggest you read the two studies to get a better feel for the reasons for the apparent failure of these programs.