U.S. Budget and Economy

Is There a Debt/GDP Threshold at 90 Percent? (Part 2) As mentioned in my prior post , I have posted an Excel spreadsheet which is an extension of one included in a zip file posted by Herndon, Ash and Pollin (hereafter called HAP). I will use data from that spreadsheet to look at the HAP criticisms of the Reinhart and Rogoff (hereafter called RR) paper described previously . A good starting point is the now infamous Excel spreadsheet shown in my prior post and repeated below: After noting the coding error by which 5 rows were excluded, the first question that occurred to me was "where's the beef?". The number of countries on which the 90 percent threshold is based is a mere seven (Belgium having been left out by RR). The HAP critique points out that RR is using only 71 data points (110 after Belgium and 14 other excluded data points are added). Since there were relatively few data points, my first inclination was to try to look at that data so see how it was di...

In January of 2010, Harvard economists Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff released an NBER working paper titled "Growth in a Time of Debt" . The paper's abstract states: 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. This 90 percent threshold was cited by a number of public figures. For example, Paul Ryan stated the following on page 80 of the House Fiscal Year 2013 Budget Resolution titled "The Path to Prosperity: A Blueprint for American Renewal" . Even if high debt did not cause ...