With the global impact of the 2020 Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19), there has been a surge in public debt and uncertainty in the global economy. As the likelihood of a recession and a higher debt for Canada increases, the utility of a forecasting model is a realistic choice to both predict and determine optimal fiscal decisions for the government. This paper seeks to ratify existing historical trends in three developed economies (Canada, Japan, and the U.K.) as well as offer a time series forecast for the proceeding five years’ debt to GDP ratio. As per the International Monetary Fund (IMF), a limit of 60% in debt to GDP ratio was employed to measure how far off these three countries were from a considerably recoverable amount of debt. The time series forecast that the U.K. will drop to 65.436% by 2025, however, Japan and Canada will continue to accumulate debt to 254.3851% and 80.107% respectively.
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Credit to Cat Anh Nguyen and Tolu Olusooto from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and the Department of Economics at McMaster University for their contributions.