Fiscal Multiplier

In economics, the fiscal multiplier is the ratio of a change in national income to the change in government spending that causes it. More generally, the exogenous spending multiplier is the ratio of a change in national income to any autonomous change in spending (private investment spending, consumer spending, government spending, or spending by foreigners on the country's exports) that causes it. When this multiplier exceeds one, the enhanced effect on national income is called the multiplier effect. The mechanism that can give rise to a multiplier effect is that an initial incremental amount of spending can lead to increased consumption spending, increasing income further and hence further increasing consumption, etc., resulting in an overall increase in national income greater than the initial incremental amount of spending. In other words, an initial change in aggregate demand may cause a change in aggregate output (and hence the aggregate income that it generates) that is a multiple of the initial change.

The existence of a multiplier effect was initially proposed by Keynes student Richard Kahn in 1930 and published in 1931. Some other schools of economic thought reject or downplay the importance of multiplier effects, particularly in terms of the long run. The multiplier effect has been used as an argument for the efficacy of government spending or taxation relief to stimulate aggregate demand.

In certain cases multiplier values less than one have been empirically measured (an example is sports stadiums), suggesting that certain types of government spending crowd out private investment or consumer spending that would have otherwise taken place. This crowding out can occur because the initial increase in spending may cause an increase in interest rates or in the price level. In 2009, because of the use of fiscal multipliers to project the benefits of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, The Economist magazine noted "economists are in fact deeply divided about how well, or indeed whether, such stimulus works" due to a lack of empirical data from non-military based stimulus. Immediately after the stimulus bill took effect, job loss slowed and private sector job growth resumed in 2010 and has continued through 2012.