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Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Troubles With Stimulus Spending

The data in Adapx's new Federal Stimulus Survey Report is all from the U.S., but I would suspect the same issues apply North of the border. The respondents were in public and private utilities, construction, engineering, survey, public works, state and local governments.

Many teams are finding that building compelling cases for stimulus money requires a resource investment to accurately document and justify their needs for stimulus money.
At a time when teams need to invest in building compelling cases for stimulus money, many are struggling to even keep up with current workloads due to reductions in personnel or pressures to increases output with their existing staff and resources.
The resource constraints and productivity pressure not only impact the ability of organizations to make their cases for stimulus money, but they also have an impact on organization’s ability to start fully spending the stimulus money once it’s granted. 82% of teams reported obstacles that would prevent them from immediately starting to spend stimulus money.
[...]
The results suggest that rather than giving an immediate jolt to the economy, stimulus spending will be delayed as most respondents don’t have the immediate resources to complete their proposed projects. Hardly an argument against stimulus spending, but pretty clearly a good sum of the money intended to be spent during the actual recession will be spent during the recover. Not a bad thing if your recovery is slow and painful, as this one seems likely to be.
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2 comments:

  1. Northern PoV10:41 AM

    The quickest (and I propose fairest) way to get money into the economy is via the EI system.

    Two days ago the US congress again boosted their EI packages.

    So instead of treating EI like a political football, the USA (where the democrats are usually to the right of CDN liberals) just get it done.

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  2. Robert G. Harvie, Q.C.1:20 PM

    BCL, I referenced your post in my own blog this morning - your post is very well done, and extremely timely.

    I also note the complete absense of any political spin one way or the other, and have tried to maintain that approach in my own post following up on yours.

    Basically - my own thought is that it doesn't matter if it works - the public demands responses, even ineffectual responses.. hardly a recipe to encourage effective government.

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