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Increased financial support could help to raise the quality of locally made films and allow them to compete with the foreign productions that currently dominate the market.

quoted from http://ielts-simon.com/ielts-help-and-english-pr/2015/06/ielts-writing-task-2-foreign-films-essay.html

Have an author made a slip not using the verb in an agreement with the subject, or there's something that I'm missing out, misreading?

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    Allow is infinitive, the complement of could: "Increased financial support could ... allow them to compete."
    – StoneyB on hiatus
    Commented Aug 29, 2017 at 14:42
  • You'd be more likely to reverse the two effects if could only applied to raising quality (i.e. - more money would definitely allow them to compete, but only might improve quality). But it doesn't seem so much "ungrammatical" as merely "non-idiomatic" to have allows in OP's exact context.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Aug 29, 2017 at 17:31
  • In your question, "Have an author..." is an error of agreement. Correct would be "Has the author...". Also "There's something..." is intended to be a question, so should be "Is there something"
    – James K
    Commented Aug 29, 2017 at 17:37
  • @FumbleFingers do you really think allows in the context wouldn't be ungrammatical, despite could?
    – Cavid Hummatov
    Commented Aug 30, 2017 at 16:54
  • @Cavid Hummatov: Consider, for example, More funding allows them to develop new products and could help raise profits next year - which per my first comment, "reverses" the sequence in which two consequences (one "definite", the other possible) are presented. Note that any other differences between my version and OP's are syntactically irrelevant. I accept that idiomatically, few people would recast my example as More funding could help raise profits next year and allows them to develop new products, but it would be ridiculous to suppose it's "ungrammatical".
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Aug 31, 2017 at 12:44

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Increased financial support could help to raise the quality of locally made films and allow them to compete with the foreign productions that currently dominate the market

allow is parallel with the verb help, they are both bare infinitives as they are the complements of "could". The meaning is "Increased financial support could ... allow (locally made films) to compete ..."

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