Selling the State: Economic Development Policy in Kentucky

The Austin IBM group in the 2000s had some of the company’s top patent producers, and the group that migrated first from Lexington became the center of the company’s super computer research. [...] During the negotiations with the legislature and the governor, other states tried to woo the affections of the firms. [...] Toyota’s decision to move the operations may well have been related to the drastic reduction of 8 Kentucky’s Economic Development Policy Delta Airlines flights into and out of Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport in nearby Hebron, KY, part of the significant realignment of the airline industry that have caused the hub facility’s fortunes to lag.18 Perhaps the main criticisms of state. [...] Whatever the benefits to businesses and the Commonwealth, the governors’ promises of job creation have been a unifying theme in selling of the state as a good place to do business and to live and work. [...] Using the words of the governors, legislative re- cords, state publications, and newspaper accounts, I explain some of the complex- ities of state-level economic development policy that led up to attracting Toyota to the state in 1985, the emergence of an economic development policy that sought to account for rural needs, and peripherally, the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990 (KERA).