Friday, October 2, 2009

Barro on stimulus packages

Click here to read an article (Wall Street Journal) from Robert Barro, professor of economics at Harvard and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Find below some points from the article:

The existing empirical evidence on the response of real gross domestic product to added government spending and tax changes is thin.

In ongoing research, we use long-term U.S. macroeconomic data to contribute to the evidence. The results mostly favor tax rate reductions over increases in government spending as a means to increase GDP.

The available empirical evidence does not support the idea that spending multipliers typically exceed one, and thus spending stimulus programs will likely raise GDP by less than the increase in government spending. Defense-spending multipliers exceeding one likely apply only at very high unemployment rates, and nondefense multipliers are probably smaller. However, there is empirical support for the proposition that tax rate reductions will increase real GDP.