External debt is a global problem in current and future developments, especially for developing countries. According to main economic theories, foreign debt should have an impact on investment and productivity. While developing countries have basic aims such as increasing the welfare levels of their individuals, ensuring stability and independence by showing development and growth, they are faced with the problem of financing sources such as high current and budget deficits. In the analysis, Autoregresive Distributed Lag Model–ARDL, Error Correction Model (VECM) co-integration and Toda Yamamoto Causality methods were used by annual data of the Turkish economy between 1990 and 2019 period. The results of the analysis show that there is an interaction and cointegration between external debt and economic growth. Besides economic growth and inflation affect external debt positively and trade openness negatively in the long run. While there is a causal relationship from economic growth to external debt burden, it has been determined that there is no causality relationship from external debt to economic growth. There is a causality from trade openness ratio to external debt. The fact that there is a causal relationship from inflation to external debt indicates that there is an increase in the external debt burden as inflation increases, but inflation does not increase when the external debt burden increases. There is a bidirectional causality relationship between inflation and economic growth