The empirical literature on the relationship between government debt and economic growth is scarce, but gaining importance.
The theoretical literature tends to point to a negative link between the public debt-to-GDP ratio and the steady-state growth rate of GDP per capita (see, for instance, Saint-Paul, 1992 and Aizenman et al., 2007). Some endogenous growth models show that a positive impact may be possible in the transition stage to steady-state, depending on the type of public goods financed out of debt (Aizenman et al., 2007) or up to certain limits when debt is used to finance productive public capital (Aschauer, 2000).