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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.