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There are several errors in the spreadsheet. Mistakes do happen but if the spreadsheet had been provided with the paper, these mistakes would have been noticed at a much earlier time, with fewer consequences.
The formulas to provide the average growth rates across all countries do not include all countries - they miss the first five countries
The formulas to calculate the growth rates at the country level do not include all the data - they miss the last five rows
The formulas for the growth rate at country / debt category level, contain hard-coded country names. A reference would be better and easier and less prone to a copy/paste error.
Some of these formulas are also missing (presumably to avoid an error if there are no supporting data points). Wrapping the formula in an IFERROR function would be a more robust approach.
The approach of averaging an average is suspect since it treats all the values at the country / debt category table as of equal importance, whereas some of the values have many more supporting data points than others. A simple average over all the data points would have been simpler and easier.
Visualising the data, for example, a scatter chart of debt-to-GDP ratio vs growth rate, may provide some insights.
Once you have completed your testing, you may be interested in the following links of articles published in 2013 and later.