At the present moment, around 96% of the world countries intensively use foreign financing, and estimations show that the total value of the world public debt exceeds 57 trln. USD. The impact of the government debt on the state economy is still controversial: there is evidence that it may either stimulate or depress economic development. Neoclassic approach based on Ricardo theory claims that the debt has no influence on the growth at all. Recent researches have demonstrated the existence of the “growth threshold”: public debt less than 60 % of GDP stimulates growth, while the debt that exceeds the threshold has a negative impact. These researches have either concentrated on “old EU countries”, or do not account for the recession of 2008 – 2010. The present paper analyses the influence of public debt on the number of economic parameters in the EU countries over the period of 2003 – 2011. In the recent years, the public debt of the EU countries has been growing, as compared with the rest of the world. Recession forced some countries to borrow intensively, but the question persists to what extent the borrowing helped to promote economic growth. The paper is based on the analysis of public available data from SMF and Eurostat databases, concerning 27 EU states, being members of the EU in 2011. The correlations between public debt and average debt interest rate, taxation rate and long-term growth (evaluated as GDP in 2011 in comparison to 2003) were investigated. The findings demonstrate that there is no correlation between the taxation rate and the debt. This means that EU states do not tend to repay debts, but rather try to re-finance them. There is no correlation between debt itself and debt interest rate; so intensive borrowing in the EU may not be explained by the availability of “cheap money”. Besides, there is a significant negative correlation between long-term growth and debt both before recession (2003) and after recession (2011). Countries that had low debt in 2003 demonstrated higher GDP growth during 2003 – 2011. The negative correlation between growth in 2003 – 2011 and the value of debt in 2011 suggests that intensive borrowing does not help to recover after the crisis. In any case, there was no clear threshold observed for the negative impact of the public debt: in the framework of existing data scattering, the highest level of debt was always associated with lower growth indicators.