4
votes
Productions that could have taken advantage of Swedish locations and craft expertise continue to run away to foreign locations for lower costs and tax incentives
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- Title
- Swedes Call for Incentives to Keep Potential Runaways at Home
- Authors
- Jon Asp
- Published
- Sep 17 2019
- Word count
- 1102 words
But what would be your alternative? Just let them go?
Yes. Be who you are, care for your people, and support local business that wants to cater to them. If you can only get certain businesses to show up because you hand them a lot of money, is it really the best thing to spend your money on? You want businesses in your country because they provide a useful service or because they provide useful tax revenue. Unless having a film company use Swedish backdrops is the best use of the country's advertising budget, why do it?
That’s a big part of why countries do this. I wonder how effective it is though. Ad agencies seem to pull numbers out of their ass when they estimate how much money exposure is worth. The latest Mission Impossible filmed its climactic scene at a spectacular cliff in Norway, Preikestolen. But in the film, this cliff was set in India. How many people would watch Tom Cruise fight there and decide they want to go there, and then do the research to find out where it’s actually located? It’s hard to measure because of numerous confounding factors. Visitors to Preikestolen increased after it was featured in M:I, but it’s hard to tell how much is the Tom Cruise effect and how much due to other factors. And the trail and plateau on top are now so crowded during summer that the place can hardly accomodate many more.
There is one other reason to do this though. The money doesn’t just disappear wholesale out of the country/region. When a large film production shows up, they spend a lot of the incentive money on local services. Everything from food and lodging to helicopter services, and myriad other things. So it does benefit the local community somewhat, although there can also be costs associated with accomodating them.
It’s not a neat equation at all. I don’t think it’s as simple as international companies taking advantage and gullible local authorities letting themselves be taken advantage of.
I don't think that it's purely a matter of companies taking advantage of the government that'll give them the most money (Though Amazon's search for the best deal for their second campus shows is does happen), but if that money is spent on local services it's then a very roundabout way of providing social support which doesn't really need a foreign middleman to route the money to local pockets.
Obviously you wouldn’t do it this way (or rather, shouldn’t) if you didn’t think there was some other benefit, like increased tourism or long-term job creation. Advertisement leading to increased tourism is the primary attraction when it comes to film productions.
The point of giving financial incentives to film companies isn’t to run a social program. My point is merely that a substantial part of the money does benefit the local economy - it’s not siphoned straight out by corporate vultures.