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IJRM is an interdisciplinary and refereed journal that provides authoritative sources of reference and an international forum in the field of revenue management. IJRM publishes well-written and academically rigorous manuscripts. Both theoretic development and applied research are welcome.

This article provides a detailed survey of existing theoretical and empirical literature on the impact of public debt on economic growth in both developing and developed economies. The aim of the article is to add to the existing debate on the relationship between public debt and economic growth in world economies. The survey finds diverse and, in some cases, inconsistent evidence on the relative impact of public debt on economic growth. Although the majority of the surveyed literature supports the negative effect of public debt on economic growth, several other studies have found a long-run positive impact of public debt on economic growth through the fiscal multiplier effect. The article also found that a few other studies support the Ricardian Equivalence Hypothesis (REH), which states that the relationship between public debt and economic growth is nonexistent. On balance, the article also found that there is a growing body of empirical evidence, which supports the presence of threshold effects in the relationship between public debt and economic growth. Overall, it concludes that theoretical models and empirical studies yield inconclusive results depending on a set of heterogeneous factors, including the level of development of the sampled countries, data coverage, methodology used, and the researchers’ choice of control variables, among other factors. This literature survey differs predominantly from other earlier studies in that it provides a comprehensive review of the linkage between government debt and economic growth, in addition to disentangling public debt into two components, domestic and foreign, and expounding on their relative effects on economic growth.

This paper explores the causality between public debt, public debt service and economic growth in South Africa covering the period 1970 – 2017. The study employs the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration and the multivariate Granger-causality test. The empirical results indicate that there is unidirectional causality from economic growth to public debt, but only in the short run. However, the study fails to establish any causality between public debt service and economic growth, both in the short run and long run. In line with the empirical evidence, the study concludes that it is economic growth that drives public debt in South Africa, and that the causal relationship between public debt and economic growth is sensitive to the timeframe considered. The paper recommends policymakers in South Africa to consider growth-enhancing policies in the short run, since poor economic performances may lead to high public debt levels.

This study contributes to the existing public debt service-economic growth nexus by examining the impact of public debt service on economic growth in Zambia using time-series method, covering the period from 1970 to 2017. The study employs the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds analysis technique, which permits the simultaneous estimation of the longand short-run model parameters. Overall, the empirical results reveal that the impact of government debt service on economic growth, in Zambia, is time-variant. Whereas the neutrality of public debt service on economic growth is confirmed in the long run, in the short run the relationship is negative. To achieve macroeconomic stability and realise sustainable economic growth rates, the paper recommends that the Zambian government, among other things, undertake active fiscal consolidation to ensure that debt repayments do not cause excessive budget overruns and are not financed from new debt; and continuously improve public debt management strategies and policies to smoothen the government debt redemption profile.