IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rim/rimwps/13_14.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Financial Stress and the Impact of Public Debt on UK Growth in High versus Low-Growth Regimes: 1850-2013

Author

Listed:
  • Costas Milas

    (University of Liverpool, UK; Rimini Centre of Economic Analysis, Italy)

Abstract

Using a long historical dataset, we estimate a Threshold Vector Autoregression (T-VAR) model for the UK based on a financial stress measure, the debt-to-GDP ratio, borrowing costs and real GDP growth. Our model allows for the impact of debt/GDP to vary between periods of high and low economic growth. We find that financial stress depresses growth much more in the low as opposed to the high-growth regime. We also find that positive shocks to debt/GDP depress economic growth and raise borrowing costs; again, the impact is much stronger when growth is low. This is an important finding as economists and policy-makers are currently debating whether it makes sense to proceed swiftly with fiscal consolidation when economic conditions remain weak.

Suggested Citation

  • Costas Milas, 2014. "Financial Stress and the Impact of Public Debt on UK Growth in High versus Low-Growth Regimes: 1850-2013," Working Paper series 13_14, Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis.
    • Handle: RePEc:rim:rimwps:13_14
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.rcea.org/RePEc/pdf/wp13_14.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Thomas Herndon & Michael Ash & Robert Pollin, 2014. "Does high public debt consistently stifle economic growth? A critique of Reinhart and Rogoff," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 38(2), pages 257-279.
    2. Bruneau, C. & de Bandt, O. & El Amri, W., 2012. "Macroeconomic fluctuations and corporate financial fragility," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 8(4), pages 219-235.
    3. Carmen M. Reinhart & Kenneth S. Rogoff, 2014. "This Time is Different: A Panoramic View of Eight Centuries of Financial Crises," Annals of Economics and Finance, Society for AEF, vol. 15(2), pages 215-268, November.
    4. Carmen M. Reinhart & Kenneth S. Rogoff, 2010. "Growth in a Time of Debt," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 100(2), pages 573-578, May.
    5. Zivot, Eric & Andrews, Donald W K, 2002. "Further Evidence on the Great Crash, the Oil-Price Shock, and the Unit-Root Hypothesis," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 20(1), pages 25-44, January.
    6. Carmen M. Reinhart & Kenneth S. Rogoff, 2009. "Varieties of Crises and Their Dates," Introductory Chapters, in: This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, Princeton University Press.
    7. Legrenzi, Gabriella & Milas, Costas, 2013. "Modelling the fiscal reaction functions of the GIPS based on state-varying thresholds," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 121(3), pages 384-389.
    8. Baxa, Jaromír & Horváth, Roman & Vašíček, Bořek, 2013. "Time-varying monetary-policy rules and financial stress: Does financial instability matter for monetary policy?," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 9(1), pages 117-138.
    9. Lawrence J. Christiano & Terry J. Fitzgerald, 2003. "The Band Pass Filter," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 44(2), pages 435-465, May.
    10. Pesaran, H. Hashem & Shin, Yongcheol, 1998. "Generalized impulse response analysis in linear multivariate models," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 58(1), pages 17-29, January.
    11. Mr. Stephan Danninger & Ms. Irina Tytell & Mr. Ravi Balakrishnan & Mr. Selim A Elekdag, 2009. "The Transmission of Financial Stress from Advanced to Emerging Economies," IMF Working Papers 2009/133, International Monetary Fund.
    12. Lof, Matthijs & Malinen, Tuomas, 2014. "Does sovereign debt weaken economic growth? A panel VAR analysis," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 122(3), pages 403-407.
    13. MacKinnon, James G, 1996. "Numerical Distribution Functions for Unit Root and Cointegration Tests," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 11(6), pages 601-618, Nov.-Dec..
    14. Cardarelli, Roberto & Elekdag, Selim & Lall, Subir, 2011. "Financial stress and economic contractions," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 7(2), pages 78-97, June.
    15. Eric M. Engen & R. Glenn Hubbard, 2005. "Federal Government Debt and Interest Rates," NBER Chapters, in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2004, Volume 19, pages 83-160, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    16. Baum, Anja & Checherita-Westphal, Cristina & Rother, Philipp, 2013. "Debt and growth: New evidence for the euro area," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 32(C), pages 809-821.
    17. Cevik, Emrah Ismail & Dibooglu, Sel & Kutan, Ali M., 2013. "Measuring financial stress in transition economies," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 9(4), pages 597-611.
    18. Nathan S. Balke, 2000. "Credit and Economic Activity: Credit Regimes and Nonlinear Propagation of Shocks," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 82(2), pages 344-349, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. António Afonso & Jaromír Baxa & Michal Slavík, 2018. "Fiscal developments and financial stress: a threshold VAR analysis," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 54(2), pages 395-423, March.
    2. Willem Vanlaer & Wim Marneffe & Lode Vereeck & Johan Vanovertveldt, 2015. "Does debt predict growth? An empirical analysis of the relationship between total debt and economic output," European Journal of Government and Economics, Europa Grande, vol. 4(2), pages 79-103, December.
    3. Janice Boucher Breuer & John McDermott, 2019. "Debt And Depression," Contemporary Economic Policy, Western Economic Association International, vol. 37(4), pages 714-730, October.
    4. Chung‐Hua Shen & Hsing‐Hua Hsu, 2022. "The determinants of Asian banking crises—Application of the panel threshold logit model," International Review of Finance, International Review of Finance Ltd., vol. 22(1), pages 248-277, March.
    5. Mitze, Timo & Matz, Florian, 2015. "Public debt and growth in German federal states: What can Europe learn?," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 37(2), pages 208-228.
    6. De Vita, Glauco & Trachanas, Emmanouil & Luo, Yun, 2018. "Revisiting the bi-directional causality between debt and growth: Evidence from linear and nonlinear tests," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 83(C), pages 55-74.
    7. Lof, Matthijs & Malinen, Tuomas, 2014. "Does sovereign debt weaken economic growth? A panel VAR analysis," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 122(3), pages 403-407.
    8. Markus Eberhardt & Andrea Filippo Presbitero, 2013. "This Time They're Different: Heterogeneity;and Nonlinearity in the Relationship;between Debt and Growth," Mo.Fi.R. Working Papers 92, Money and Finance Research group (Mo.Fi.R.) - Univ. Politecnica Marche - Dept. Economic and Social Sciences.
    9. Ruthira Naraidoo & Leroi Raputsoane, 2015. "Debt Sustainability and Financial Crises in South Africa," Emerging Markets Finance and Trade, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 51(1), pages 224-233, January.
    10. Apostolakis, George & Papadopoulos, Athanasios P., 2015. "Financial stress spillovers across the banking, securities and foreign exchange markets," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 19(C), pages 1-21.
    11. Obiyathulla Ismath Bacha, Abbas Mirakhor, Hossein Askari, 2015. "Risk Sharing in Corporate and Public Finance: The Contribution of Islamic Finance," PSL Quarterly Review, Economia civile, vol. 68(274), pages 187-213.
    12. Bruno Bonizzi, 2015. "Capital Market Inflation in Emerging Markets: the Cases of Brazil and South Korea," PSL Quarterly Review, Economia civile, vol. 68(273), pages 115-150.
    13. Simone Salotti & Carmine Trecroci, 2016. "The Impact of Government Debt, Expenditure and Taxes on Aggregate Investment and Productivity Growth," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 83(330), pages 356-384, April.
    14. Markus Eberhardt, 2013. "Nonlinearities in the Relationship between Debt and Growth: Evidence from Co-Summability Testing," Discussion Papers 2013/06, University of Nottingham, Centre for Finance, Credit and Macroeconomics (CFCM).
    15. repec:ecb:ecbops:2014165 is not listed on IDEAS
    16. João Basilio Pereima & Manuela Merki & Fernando Motta Correia, 2016. "Economic Growth And Public Debt: Addressing Unobserved Heterogeneity," Anais do XLIII Encontro Nacional de Economia [Proceedings of the 43rd Brazilian Economics Meeting] 101, ANPEC - Associação Nacional dos Centros de Pós-Graduação em Economia [Brazilian Association of Graduate Programs in Economics].
    17. Dieppe, Alistair & Mourinho Félix, Ricardo & Marchiori, Luca & Grech, Owen & Albani, Maria & Lalouette, Laure & Kulikov, Dmitry & Papadopoulou, Niki & Sideris, Dimitris & Irac, Delphine & Gordo Mora, , 2015. "Public debt, population ageing and medium-term growth," Occasional Paper Series 165, European Central Bank.
    18. İbrahim ÖZMEN, 2022. "New Evidence from Government Debt and Economic Growth in Core and Periphery European Union Countries : Asymmetric Panel Causality," Journal for Economic Forecasting, Institute for Economic Forecasting, vol. 0(3), pages 167-187, October.
    19. Marta Gómez-Puig & Simón Sosvilla-Rivero, 2015. "“On the bi-directional causal relationship between public debt and economic growth in EMU countries”," IREA Working Papers 201512, University of Barcelona, Research Institute of Applied Economics, revised May 2015.
    20. Mansour-Ichrakieh, Layal, 2020. "The impact of Israeli Geopolitical Risks on the Lebanese Financial Market: A Destabilizer Multiplier," MPRA Paper 99376, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    21. Vassilis Monastiriotis, 2014. "(When) Does Austerity Work? On the Conditional Link between Fiscal Austerity and Debt Sustainability," Cyprus Economic Policy Review, University of Cyprus, Economics Research Centre, vol. 8(1), pages 71-92, June.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Debt; financial stress; GDP growth regimes;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C2 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables
    • H3 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents
    • H6 - Public Economics - - National Budget, Deficit, and Debt

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rim:rimwps:13_14. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Marco Savioli (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/rcfeait.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.