Tax Incentives in the Audiovisual Landscape: The Economic and the Cultural

This chapter examines the historical shift towards the use of tax incentives in film policy and identifies the main factors encouraging its global spread. Although tax credit policies are considered to be primarily economic in character, the chapter also seeks to bring out the social and cultural assumptions underpinning their use. In doing so, it identifies some of the tensions between the economic and the cultural, and the national and transnational, shaping the maintenance of tax credit regimes for film. It develops these arguments in relation to the examples of Ireland and Britain both of which reveal some of the ways in which the implementation of tax incentives entail a complicated mix of arguments and assumptions about the ‘national and the ‘transnational’ and the ‘economic’ and the ‘cultural’.