Using County Typologies to Inform Job Tax Credit Policy in Georgia

Some problems with the Georgia job tax credit program have been outlined as have some potential remedies. In this paper, we analyze Georgia's job tax credit policy through a county typology lens. County typologies are created using factor analysis of the most recently available demographic, socioeconomic, amenity, industrial, and fiscal data to endogenously locate different aggregations of Georgia counties. Then, we visually inspect the different county aggregations for clusters of counties. Finally, we illustrate the utility of these county types to recommend policy changes in the State's policy on job tax credit tiers.