Growth in a time of debt

Citation: Carmen M. Reinhart, Kenneth S. Rogoff (Jan 2010) Growth in a time of debt. NBER Working Paper (RSS)
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Growth in a time of debt
Download: http://www.nber.org/papers/w15639
Tagged: Economics (RSS)

Summary

We study economic growth and inflation at different levels of government and external debt. Our analysis is based on new data on forty-four countries spanning about two hundred years. The dataset incorporates over 3,700 annual observations covering a wide range of political systems, institutions, exchange rate arrangements, and historic circumstances. Our main findings are: First, the relationship between government debt and real GDP growth is weak for debt/GDP ratios below a threshold of 90 percent of GDP. Above 90 percent, median growth rates fall by one percent, and average growth falls considerably more. We find that the threshold for public debt is similar in advanced and emerging economies. Second, emerging markets face lower thresholds for external debt (public and private)—which is usually denominated in a foreign currency. When external debt reaches 60 percent of GDP, annual growth declines by about two percent; for higher levels, growth rates are roughly cut in half. Third, there is no apparent contemporaneous link between inflation and public debt levels for the advanced countries as a group (some countries, such as the United States, have experienced higher inflation when debt/GDP is high.) The story is entirely different for emerging markets, where inflation rises sharply as debt increases.

Commentary

• Summary of conclusions:
• Data: Unbalanced panel of 44 countries over more than a century.
• Finding: When government debt gets to or above a threshhold of 90% of annual GDP there is a noticeable negtive effect on GDP.

• Contradictory study "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff" shows that the data set in the original paper mistakenly excluded five influential observation-countries and this widely-cited conclusion is not strongly shown in the full data. There was a lot of commentary on this including this blog post in Retraction Watch.

Works on AcaWiki that dispute this one	Subject
Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff	Economics