The Obama administration’s economic stimulus package took on the Great Recession through steps that included a temporary increase in food stamp benefits. Now a USDA report says that higher per-capita SNAP redemptions “had a positive average impact on county-level employment” in rural areas from 2001 to 2014 but especially during the recession, which lasted from 2008 to 2010.
The impact on employment was expected; one of the arguments for the 13.6-percent increase in the maximum SNAP benefit in 2009 was that recipients would buy more food and begin a multiplier effect of economic activity. “But the size of the impacts estimated in this study are larger,” wrote four USDA economists who focused on the effect on employment at the county level. Earlier studies looked at impacts on the national level, where aggregate changes might be smaller than those seen on a smaller geographical scale, they said.
During the 2008-2010 recession, each additional $10,000 in SNAP spending in a rural county boosted employment by 1 job. In urban counties, the same expenditure increased employment by 0.4 jobs. “The impact of SNAP redemptions after the recession … were statistically insignificant for both non-metro and metro counties,” says the report.
“During the Great Recession, the impacts of SNAP redemptions per dollar spent were larger than impacts per dollar spent on other federal or state government transfer payments combined … and were much larger than the impacts of total federal government spending per dollar spent.”
The report, “The Impacts of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Redemptions on County-Level Employment,” is available here.