Florida Halved the Investment Benefit Before Scoring Its Own Offices

Florida's Office of Economic and Demographic Research scored the state's export assistance program at 0.69 in its 2026 evaluation, covering fiscal years 2020–21 through 2022–23. For every dollar the state spent on services to exporters, EDR calculated that it recovered 69 cents in state tax revenue. The same report scored Florida's network of international offices, the arm that recruits foreign investment, at 5.23. This is EDR's fourth evaluation of these two programs.

Both ratios rose. The export program returned 0.04 in the previous analysis and the international offices returned 4.4. Two footnotes explain part of the movement. In earlier editions EDR treated the state's expenditures as the investment, and those expenditures included event income and other revenue. This time it used appropriations, a change EDR says brings the review into line with its reviews of other programs. The denominator changed partway through the series, which means 0.69 and 0.04 are not measuring the same thing, and neither are 5.23 and 4.4.

The list of deductions EDR applied before arriving at those ratios is worth more than the ratios, because it describes how much of a promotion agency's claimed result survives an outside reading. EDR attributed only half the economic benefit of the international offices to the offices themselves, on the ground that the offices make first contact and then refer the opportunity to a business development team the statutory review does not cover. It then removed projects whose firms serve Florida customers or depend on Florida resources, since those firms or their competitors would have come regardless. The report gives that cull twice and inconsistently, as 20 of 117 projects in its summary and findings and as 25 of 121 in an earlier passage.

EDR is blunt about the data underneath. It calls the international offices file problematic: employment and capital figures were never verified, because no rule requires a company to submit proof; the figures are forward-looking and are not tied to specific years, so the analysis spreads them evenly across the three-year window; and the file carried no industry codes, so each company had to be researched to assign one. On the export side EDR could not use the reported sales at all. The dataset it received held far more observations and far larger sales than in prior years, so it estimated sales instead, by applying an earlier study's ratio of program sales to total exports against Census Bureau export data. EDR also states plainly that it did not independently audit any of it.

Caveats this heavy could be read as making the ratio worthless, but the harder problem runs the other way. Florida law fixes what the measure is, namely the direct, indirect, and induced gains in state revenues as a share of the state's investment, and EDR says the measure does not address whether a program is effective or socially beneficial, and that it is conditioned by the state's tax policy. An agency that wants a verdict on whether promotion works is asking a question this instrument was never built to answer, and the field's answers to that question are unsettled. EDR's own literature review reports that Bernard and Jensen found no relationship between a state's export promotion spending and its manufacturing exports, that Wilkinson found a negative relationship between US state trade missions and state export sales and concluded missions were better suited to attracting foreign investment, and that Coughlin's 2000 study found a negative though not significant relationship between international offices and investment attraction.

Florida's trade position moved in the opposite direction from the ratios over the same decade. Florida-origin goods exports reached $68.9 billion in 2023, 13.9% above the $60.5 billion benchmark EDR set for 2013. Across the same decade, goods exports as a share of Florida's gross domestic product fell from 7.4% in 2013 to 5.4% in 2016, 4.9% in 2019 and 4.3% in 2023, and the International Trade Administration's count of jobs dependent on Florida goods exports fell from 262,000 in 2013 to 208,499 in 2023. Neither series is attributed to the program, and the stronger explanation for the divergence is that state output grew faster than exports did rather than that promotion failed. This reading is falsifiable on a date. If EDR's fifth evaluation holds the appropriations definition constant and the international offices ratio stays above 5, then the methodology change is not what moved the number and this account is wrong. That report will also score an organization the current one did not evaluate, because House Bill 5 folded Enterprise Florida into the Florida Department of Commerce and a new direct-support organization, SelectFlorida, in 2023, after the review period closed.