Negative growth to positive is a change in direction, no? How is treating nineteen years of British data as having the same weight as one year of NZ data a "fa

Negative growth to positive is a change in direction, no? How is treating nineteen years of British data as having the same weight as one year of NZ data a "fairly standard weighting"? Britain is far larger in population on top of everything else. "So what do Herndon-Ash-Pollin conclude? They find "the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent, not -0.1 percent as [Reinhart-Rogoff claim]." [UPDATE: To clarify, they find 2.2 percent if they include all the years, weigh by number of years, and avoid the Excel error.] Going further into the data, they are unable to find a breakpoint where growth falls quickly and significantly." 2.2 vs -0.1 — you're only out by an order of magnitude. As you say, weighting by number of years is also a problem. If you weighted the values by population or size of economy ("fairly standard weighting") I suspect the results would shift again but be biased in favor of more recent figures (economies and populations are bigger over time). http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally-replicated-reinhart-rogoff-and-there-are-serious-problems http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally-rep... TL;DR -- none. Read the evidence.