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This post is a more complete statement of my conclusions based on the analysis in Parts One and Two of this series. As I’ve explained in Part Two, there’s no reason in the Reinhart-Rogoff (R-R) data to believe that the debt-to-GDP ratio has a negative impact on growth. Ironically, that’s because their data set is terribly biased in its incompleteness, and was constructed to try to prove that there was a negative relationship between the debt-to-GDP ratio and economic growth. The interests supporting the RR work, both in its inception, and in disseminating its original results, were clearly trying to develop a basis for saying that since there is such a negative relationship, the right thing to do when the ratio gets too high (over 90%) is to implement a program of austerity aimed at deficit reduction, more or less drastic, depending on the individual case. Continue reading →

In Part One, I asked whether the Carmen Reinhart/Kenneth Rogoff study and book didn’t show that, on average, nations experiencing debt-to-GDP ratios above 90% had negative rates of economic growth? And I said the answer to the question was “no.” But I didn’t explain why that was true. So, here goes.

The Fall

When Reinhart and Rogoff published their work they did not make their data set available to people to replicate, analyze, critique their findings, and augment to improve the data set. They ignored the scientific norm that you do that when you’re claiming that you’ve made an important empirical discovery. Other researchers wrote them and requested access to their data set in vain for at least the past three years. Continue reading →