A new International Monetary Fund report argues against the notion that large government debt burdens necessarily hold down economic growth.

That view gained widespread acceptance after a 2010 paper by Harvard University economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff in which they posited that a government debt total above 90 percent of GDP greatly restricts a country's GDP growth.

In their paper, IMF researchers Andrea Pescatori, Damiano Sandri and John Simon say they don't see any proof of that idea, CNBC.com reports.

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"We find no evidence of threshold effects over any but the shortest-term horizons. The remaining relationship between debt and growth is relatively muted, and the magnitude is much smaller than the dramatic figures suggested in earlier studies," the economists wrote, according to the news service.

"Furthermore, we find the debt trajectory can be as important as the debt level in understanding future growth prospects, since countries with high but declining debt appear to grow equally as fast as countries with lower debt."

The authors don't deny the importance of debt. "We have found some evidence that higher debt appears to be associated with more volatile growth," they wrote.

Meanwhile, the European Union reported last month that debt in the eurozone fell to a combined 92.7 percent of GDP in the third quarter from 93.4 percent in the second, the first drop since 2007.

But the group is unlikely to make much more progress unless its sluggish GDP growth accelerates, Neville Hill, an economist at Credit Suisse, tells The Wall Street Journal.

Eurozone GDP expanded 0.3 percent in the fourth quarter from the third quarter.

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