There’s no such thing as a free lunch. That’s true for economic growth as well. A recent study by two of China’s government think tanks says that the country’s better-than-expected economic growth in the first quarter came at the cost of surging debt.

China’s ratio of outstanding debts in the real economy to nominal gross domestic product increased to 248.83% at the end of the first quarter, the highest reading since the end of 1993 when China started to record such data, according to a study released Tuesday by Beijing-based think tanks the National Institution for Finance & Development and the Institute of Economics under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

This ratio was up 5.1 percentage points from end-2018, largely due to the shift in policy focus towards stabilizing economic growth, the report said. China’s economy grew 6.4% in the first quarter of this year, unchanged from the rate logged in the last three months of 2018 and snapping a slowing streak in the previous three consecutive quarters.

“The increase (in the leverage ratio) was very fast,” said Zhang Xiaojing, deputy director of Institute of Economics, at the conference that released the report. “If the leverage ratio continues to increase at the speed it did in the first quarter, China might go back to the days when leverage ratios had been growing by double-digits annually.”

Related: Chinese Economy Grows at 6.4%, Outstripping Estimates