Examining Corporate Welfare Programmes

Abstract

Chapter 4 focused on broad and largely general corporate welfare measures. This chapter examines, in more detail, state provision that benefits individual firms and specific sectors of the economy by, focusing on targeted corporate subsidies and direct company ben­efits. It draws primarily on WTO data on corporate subsidies that, although patchy, provides a useful glimpse into the range of state support provided to businesses in a number of countries. The first section presents an analysis of the WTO returns for 2006 of seven dif­ferent countries — the US, the UK, Sweden, France, Germany, Canada and Japan — in order to examine the most important and costliest subsidies provided by these nations and to reveal the key sectors that benefit most from subsidies. The second section examines in detail the full WTO return for one country, the US. This provides fuller evidence of the range of subsidies that are distributed to different sectors. The third section builds on these and other data in order to describe in more detail the kinds of support measures provided by governments to different sectors. The final section looks beyond gen­eral business sectors by detailing specific forms of support that accrue to six case-study firms.