Growth in a Time of Debt

Abstract

In this paper, we exploit a new multi-country historical dataset on public (government) debt to search for a systemic relationship between high public debt level growth and inflation our main result is that whereas the link between growth and debt seems relatively weak at “normal” debt levels, median growth rates for countries with over roughly ninety percent of gdp are about one percent lower than otherwise; average (mean) growth rates are several percent lower . surprisingly,