By Caleb Taylor
ACRE Scholar and UCA Assistant Professor of Economics Dr. Jeremy Horpedahl participated in a panel discussion entitled “The Arkansas Business Status and Future under the Trump Era” at the annual meeting of the Arkansas College Teachers Of Economics and Business (ACTEB) on September 29th, 2017.
Other panelists included Arkansas Economic Development Commission’s Tom Chilton, Economic Development Alliance for Jefferson County’s Caleb McMahon, Arkansas Economic Development Institute’s Michael Pakko, and Simmons Bank’s Kelton Harrison. The discussion was moderated by ACRE Scholar and UCA Associate Professor of Economics Dr. Tom Snyder.
Topics of conversation from the panelist included ways Arkansas might improve its economic competitiveness compared to other states, ways to improve workforce education, and the current status of Arkansas’s economy.
Horpedahl said Arkansas policymakers should consider a “more broad strategy” of economic development where “entrepreneurs can thrive and businesses will come here not because they were targeted but because it looks attractive in general.”
Horpedahl said:
“I see there’s kind of two strategies of economic development that aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but two different kinds of policies you can follow. One is a kind of targeted economic development where you are trying to directly attract firms to come here. The other strategy is to provide a system where entrepreneurs are free to make investments where they see opportunities, but there’s no central direction to it. You can pursue both of these at the same time. I think we’ve done a lot of the first of trying to attract firms whether they’re international firms or from other states. I think we’ve been kind of lagging on the second one which is to have a general climate of low taxes, tolerable regulations and that sort. I know there’s a lot of work at the Legislature trying to move in that direction. If we look at things such as our corporate tax rate, it’s the second highest in the South. If we look at something like occupational licensing, we have the second-highest occupational licensing burden in the country by some measures. These are some things along with other economic development policies we really need to look at pursuing.”
A full transcript of the meeting can be found here.
Horpedahl is the co-author with Tax Foundation experts of “Arkansas: The Road Map To Tax Reform.” The rest of ACRE’s work on tax policy can be found here. For more of ACRE’s work on economic development, check out “Tax Breaks and Subsidies: Challenging the Arkansas Status Quo” by ACRE Policy Analyst Jacob Bundrick and “The Effects of Arkansas’ Occupational Licensure Regulations” by Snyder.
You can watch the full ACTEB panel presentation here, and stay up to date on our videos by following our YouTube page.