Public Debt and Economic Growth in Advanced Economies: A Survey

Ugo Panizza and Andrea Presbitero

Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics (SJES), 2013, vol. 149, issue II, 175-204

Abstract: This paper surveys the recent literature on the links between public debt and economic growth in advanced economies. We find that theoretical models yield ambiguous results. Whether high levels of public debt have a negative effect on long-run growth is thus an empirical question. While many papers have found a negative correlation between debt and growth, our reading of the empirical literature is that there is no paper that can make a strong case for a causal relationship going from debt to economic growth. We also find that the presence of thresholds and, more in general, of a non-monotone relationship between debt and growth is not robust to small changes in data coverage and empirical techniques. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges involved in measuring and defining public debt and some suggestions for future research which, in our view, should emphasize cross-country heterogeneity.

Keywords: Government Debt; Growth; OECD countries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F33 F34 F35 O11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (205)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sjes.ch/papers/2013-II-6.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Public Debt and Economic Growth in Advanced Economies: A Survey (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ses:arsjes:2013-ii-6

Access Statistics for this article

Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics (SJES) is currently edited by Marius Brülhart

More articles in Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics (SJES) from Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics (SSES) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kurt Schmidheiny ().