• thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    1 month ago

    There's also this massive 2010 paper called "Growth in a Time of Debt" that was used by the EU to justify austerity measures in Greece and elsewhere. The paper claimed that countries with debt ratios above 90 per cent of GDP suffer a yearly 0.1 per cent contraction in their economies, so therefore you have to reduce debt ratios to below 90% so GDP can grow again. Was cited everywhere, a massive impact on the real world, one of the pillars of austerity.

    Turns out this is completely wrong because their sum in Excel was "accidentally" missing a few countries and instead when they corrected that Excel issue turns out "that countries with the quoted debt ratio grew 2.2 per cent, only 1 per cent less than nations with lower debt ratios."

    Per: https://voxeurop.eu/en/austerity-measures-in-europe-are-due-to-an-excel-error/

    • PKMKII [none/use name]
      ·
      1 month ago

      Yeah that was the one I was thinking of, just didn’t remember all the details correctly.