Why Hasn’t the US Economic Stimulus Been More Effective?: The debate on tax and expenditure multipliers

F. Gerard Adams & Byron Gangnes

Published: December 2010

Recently questions have been raised about the effectiveness of fiscal stimulus policies, and about whether stimulus to a recessionary economy should be in the form of tax cuts or expenditure increases. This paper evaluates alternative empirical approaches to measuring the impact of fiscal policy and presents new results based on simulations of a large econometric model of the US economy.

The US economic stimulus has not been more effective because, large as it is, it has not been sufficient to offset the impact of a serious recession and because it has been phased in slowly. Multiplier simulations and other studies suggest that the recession would have been considerably more serious in the absence of the economic stimulus programme.