Government Debt and its Macroeconomic Determinants – An Empirical Investigation

Vighneswara Swamy

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: In the context of rising government debt levels in advanced economies and the ongoing euro zone debt crisis, there has been a revival of academic and policy debate on the impact of growing government debt on economic growth. This data-rich study offers an econometric investigation of the macroeconomic determinants of government debt and answers the much-debated question – What factors influence the government debt in a sovereign country? The study provides analyses for economy groupings, political governance groupings and income groupings of countries in addition to the full sample. Panel Granger causality testing is employed to establish causality running from the determinants of debt. The results of the full sample analysis reveal that real GDP growth, foreign direct investment, government expenditure, inflation and population growth have negative effect on debt. Gross fixed capital formation, final consumption expenditure, and trade openness have positive effect on debt. The results for different country groupings bring out some interesting implications.

Keywords: Government Debt; economic growth; panel data; nonlinearity; country groupings (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C33 C36 E62 H63 O4 O40 O5 O50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:64106

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