Unité mixte de recherche 7235

Public debt, economic growth and nonlinear effects: Myth or reality?

Balázs Egert

[en]The economics profession seems to increasingly endorse the existence of a strongly negative nonlinear effect of public debt on economic growth. Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) were the first to point out that a public debt-to-GDP ratio higher than 90% of GDP is associated with considerably lower economic performance in advanced and emerging economies alike. A string of recent empirical papers broadly validates this threshold value. This paper seeks to contribute to this literature by putting a variant of the Reinhart-Rogoff dataset to a formal econometric testing. Using nonlinear threshold models, there is some evidence in favour of a negative nonlinear relationship between debt and growth. But these results are very sensitive to the time dimension and country coverage considered, data frequency (annual data vs. multi-year averages) and assumptions on the minimum number of observations required in each nonlinear regime. In addition, we also show that nonlinear effects can kick in at much lower levels of public debt (between 20% and 60% of GDP). These results, based on bivariate regressions on secular time series, are largely confirmed on a shorter dataset (1960-2010) when using a multivariate growth framework that accounts for traditional drivers of long-term economic growth and model uncertainty. Nonlinear effects might be more complex and difficult to model than previously thought. Instability might be a result of nonlinear effects changing over time, across countries and economic conditions. Further research is certainly needed to fully understand the link between public debt and growth.[/en]

AGENDA

vendredi 2 juin 2023

Rencontres économiques

9h30 à 11h30

Le renouveau industriel français est-il encore possible ?

jeudi 8 juin 2023

Doctorants

Sahil Chopra (Université Sorbonne Paris-Nord)

Economics of litigation : Securities class action with third-party funding

lundi 12 juin 2023

Law, Institutions and Economics in Nanterre (LIEN)

Arthur Silve (IAST / Univ. Laval)

TBA

jeudi 15 juin 2023

Lunch

Guillaume Pierné

TBA

lundi 19 juin 2023

Law, Institutions and Economics in Nanterre (LIEN)

Juan Mora-Sanguinetti (Banco de Espana)

TBA

jeudi 22 juin 2023

Doctorants

Jules Chaperon

TBA

vendredi 1 septembre 2023

Professeurs invités

Ken Yahagi

lundi 18 septembre 2023

Colloques et Workshops

L’économie de la régulation entre intérêt public et intérêts privés : capture, conflits d’intérêts et revolving doors

Inscription aux Newsletters