Friday, August 20, 2010

But wait, stimulus was even cheaper...


What about all NewStart and other spending it saved?

Peter Whiteford reckons that by spending high (3rd highest), we ended up spending relatively low (11th lowest).

Paper below.

Oh, and here's David Gruen of the Treasury:


It is worth providing a brief summary of some of the benefits of avoiding a recession that would not be relevant if a recession was instead simply an equilibrium market outcome.

The first, and most obvious, benefit is that involuntary unemployment is lower than it would otherwise be. Among other things, lower involuntary unemployment implies less long-term unemployment and hence less skill atrophy and less general disaffection with society on the part of the long-term unemployed. Treasury estimates imply that the fiscal packages reduced the peak unemployment rate by 1½ percentage points. I suspect, however, that this is an underestimate, both because it was calculated using conservative fiscal multiplier estimates, and because it takes insufficient account of the favourable feedback loop that I spoke about earlier when discussing the impact of expansionary macroeconomic policy on confidence.

But there are further benefits to avoiding a recession that would need to be taken into account in a realistic cost-benefit analysis of discretionary fiscal stimulus. Recessions break productive links between firms, and between firms and workers, when firms that would otherwise be viable over the long-term are driven into bankruptcy by a recession.13 In other words, plenty of the destruction that occurs in a recession is not creative destruction.

Finally, recessions do long-lasting damage, particularly to that cohort of people entering the labour market at the time the recession hits. Thus, for example, university graduates entering the labour market in a recession suffer sizeable initial earnings losses, losses that persist for a period estimated at between eight and fifteen years – that is, long after the recession has ended (Oreopoulos et al., 2006, Kahn 2009).



The Stimulus and the Costs of Unemployment



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