Fiscal Stimulus Making an Impact around the World One of the
challenges in evaluating the impact of fiscal stimulus is to
figure out what would have happened had there been no stimulus.
Earlier, this blog discussed evidence that the American Recovery
and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is having a positive impact on the
U.S. economy. More evidence can be found in the Second Quarterly
Report of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009,
and independent evaluations have been highlighted in the media
like in this analysis from the New York Times. Another type of
evidence can come from looking at the impact of stimulus across
countries. This economic crisis has been a world-wide crisis and
the government of nearly every major economy engaged in
discretionary fiscal stimulus to try to rekindle demand. As
shown in Chapter 3 of the Economic Report of the President, real
GDP growth performance varied with the amount of stimulus. One
cannot simply look at growth and stimulus alone, because the
economic crisis differ