IMF researchers have waded into the controversial topic of the impact of public debt on economic growth, finding there is no universal threshold at which high public debt becomes a drag on growth, in a working paper published on September 8.

Famous studies such as Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s 2010 paper identifying a 90% debt-to-GDP ratio as a threshold fail to account for the “strong homogeneity” across countries, or other factors such as global spillovers, authors Alexander Chudik