Economic Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Third Quarterly Report, April 14, 2010

摘要

As part of the unprecedented accountability and transparency provisions included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) was charged with providing to Congress quarterly reports on the effects of the Recovery Act on overall economic activity, and on employment in particular. In this third report, we provide an assessment of the effects of the Act through the first quarter of 2010. Evaluating the impact of countercyclical macroeconomic policy is inherently difficult because we do not observe what would have happened to the economy in the absence of policy. Because of the challenges in the analysis, we approach the task of estimating the impact of the Recovery Act from a number of different directions, and supplement our estimates with those of numerous outside analysts.