🇧🇪 Belgium vs 🇯🇵 Japan

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Japan currently owes about 10.4× as much as Belgium — a gap of $7.90 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, Belgium ranks 15th by debt-to-GDP and Japan 1st. Measured per person, Belgium is 4th and Japan 3rd.

Analysis

By total government debt, Belgium ranks 16th and Japan 3rd among the 135 sovereigns tracked on this site.

On a per-citizen basis the picture can look different from the nominal totals: a resident's notional share of the government debt in Japan is roughly 1.0× that in Belgium ($71,251 vs $70,130 per person).

Both countries carry debt above 100% of GDP — Belgium at 108% and Japan at 205% — meaning each owes more than a full year's worth of national output. What that means for each depends on who holds the debt, in what currency and at what interest rate.

The gap between them is narrowing: Belgium's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($2K/sec vs −$15K/sec for Japan), closing the difference by roughly $1,447,632,000 per day. At that pace — and holding both growth rates constant, a simplification, since real-world rates shift with fiscal policy — the two would reach a similar total in roughly 15 years.

Scale is part of the story too: Japan's population (123M) is about 10.3× Belgium's (12M), which is part of why the nominal and per-capita comparisons above can point in different directions — a government's debt load scales loosely with the size of both its economy and its population, not either alone.

This analysis is generated automatically from live data as an educational orientation, not financial advice — see the methodology page for definitions and caveats.

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