Caitlin Kenney | NPR

The Obama administration has released its second quarterly report to Congress about the impact of the economic stimulus package, the American Recovery And Reinvestment Act. Among the key findings:

The two CEA methods of estimating the impact of the fiscal stimulus suggest that the ARRA added between 2 and 3 percentage points to real GDP growth in the second quarter of 2009; between 3 and 4 percentage points in the third quarter; and between 11/2 and 3 percentage points in the fourth quarter.

For the third quarter of 2009, we now have direct reports on jobs created or saved from a subset of recipients of ARRA funds. These reports identify 640,000 jobs that would not have existed but for the Recovery Act.

The CEA estimates that as of the fourth quarter of 2009, the ARRA has raised employment relative to what it otherwise would have been by 11/2 to 2 million.

Christina Romer, head of the Council of Economic Advisers, presented the report and called the impact on jobs “truly stunning.”

The White House has been criticized by Congressional Republicans and others for putting too much emphasis on the job-creation reports. As the Washington Post reports: “Romer’s new figures are based on macroeconomic estimates, not reports filed by stimulus funding recipients, the next round of which is due later this month. ” From the report:

…Using the past history of GDP and employment and actual data through the first quarter of 2009, one would have predicted that employment as of the middle of the fourth quarter would be about 2 million lower than it actually was. To ascribe much of this difference to the ARRA, the key policy action taken in the first quarter, is certainly plausible. However, other policy actions, such as the Financial Stability Plan, monetary policy,and the Federal Reserve’s program of buying agency debt and long-term U.S. government bonds, surely contributed to the difference.

Meantime, the OMB recently announced new rules for stimulus recipients to follow when reporting the number of jobs saved or created. The new rules came after after initial reports showed wildly varying numbers with some reporting every job “saved” and other reporting no jobs “saved.” The new rules ask recipients to count “saved” jobs by estimating how many employees in a given quarter were working on projects paid for by stimulus dollars.