New Evidence on Debt as an Obstacle for US Economic Growth

Abstract

The US government debt is now in uncharted waters. From the founding of the nation until 1968, government debt moved up and down without a trend, but over the past 50 years, debt relative to the size of the economy has increased continuously. The United States does not appear to have a coherent debt policy. It is not Greece, and there is no evidence of a likely default on US government bonds in the near future. However, there is evidence that Americans have already borne the costs of high debt levels, and without a reform of policy these costs will continue in the future. Using a new econometric technique for threshold autoregression and a debt measure that includes private debt as well as public debt, we estimate that in the period 1995 to 2014, US economic growth was more than 1 percentage point lower than it would have been at a debt level below the threshold. Other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries also had lower growth rates as a result of high debt levels. Many countries have recently adopted some form of fiscal rule, including balanced budgets, intended to limit debt and raise growth rates. Fiscal rules involve a tradeoff between limiting debt and preserving flexibility to respond to economic shocks. In this paper we discuss problems related to designing optimal fiscal rules.