More than three-quarters of the jobs created or saved by the Obama-backed stimulus measures in the first year were in government, according to a recent study.

For the study, Bill Dupor, an economics professor at The Ohio State University, analyzed data came from Recovery.gov, a federal government site that compiles Recovery Act information.

Of the 682,000 estimated jobs saved or created in 2009, the first year of the program, only 166,000 were in the private sector.

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The $821 billion stimulus program required that any public or private recipient of the federal largesse had to report back to the government the number of full-time equivalent jobs that were created or saved.

Some critics of the stimulus program have claimed it was geared toward increasing state and local government spending levels rather than toward boosting economic growth, according to Investor’s Business Daily (IBD).

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated the stimulus program created or saved 1.6 million to 4.6 million jobs by the first quarter of 2011, but the CBO numbers relied on economic models rather than actual data. Even if accurate, the CBO numbers did not offset the nearly 6.8 million jobs lost between February 2008 and February 2010, IBD noted.

“It’s still an open question about the effect of the stimulus, and it will take more time to sort it out,” Dupor told IBD. “But it’s coming to a point now where we’re beginning to understand that there is no real evidence to say that we avoided a great depression through the stimulus.”

The president's Council of Economic Advisers estimated last year that The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 saved or created between 2.4 million and 3.6 million jobs by the end of March 2011.

Dupor said his study used the recipient-reported job creation data, which does not require any identification or statistical modeling assumptions, whereas other analyses include aggregate time series and cross-sectional studies.

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