A University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy (CROWE) report shows the Manufacturing & Agriculture Tax Credit helped strengthen Wisconsin’s manufacturing competitiveness and support job growth over the past decade.
The Manufacturing and Agriculture Credit, phased in beginning in 2013, reduces the Wisconsin income-tax burden on qualifying manufacturing production by as much as 7.5 percentage points. The credit is tied more directly to production in Wisconsin under a general rule rather than through company-by-company negotiations.
For every 100 manufacturing jobs in Wisconsin’s border counties in 2012, there were about 117 in 2025. Across the state line, 100 had become 96. Had Wisconsin’s border counties followed their neighbors’ path, they would have had roughly 11,900 fewer manufacturing jobs in 2025.
To address the uneven impact of the Great Recession, we also start in 2007 and remove three border counties. Wisconsin still leads by 13.6 points through 2025.
From 2012 to 2025, manufacturing employment grew 21.1 percentage points more on the Wisconsin side than across the state line, compared with a 5.5-point advantage in health care, retail, restaurants, and other locally oriented services. The manufacturing gap was nearly four times as large.
Census data on business dynamics show that the gap opened mainly through expansion at existing plants. Existing Wisconsin manufacturing plants added jobs much faster than existing plants across the state line, while job creation from new establishments was nearly identical. T
Taken together, the evidence suggests that the MAC materially improved Wisconsin’s position as a place to manufacture.
