This paper contributes to the literature by empirically examining whether the influence of public debt on economic growth differs between the short and the long run and presents different patterns across euroarea countries. To this end, we use annual data from both central and peripheral countries of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) for the 1960-2012 period and estimate a growth model augmented for public debt using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach. Our findings tend to support the view that public debt always has a negative impact on the long-run performance of EMU countries, whilst its short-run effect may be positive depending on the country.