The Relationship Between Government Debt and Economic Growth in North Macedonia

This paper empirically investigates the long run relation between domestic and external general government debt and economic growth in North Macedonia. We analyze how the government debt at a certain point in time is correlated with the GDP growth rate. The study employs a regression model as well as ANOVA test in order to investigate the causal relationship between government debt and GDP growth rate using annual data for the time period 2005 – 2019. We find strong evidence for a significantly positive relation between domestic general government debt and growth and negative relation between external general government debt and growth