🇧🇫 Burkina Faso vs 🇯🇵 Japan

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Japan currently owes about 540.9× as much as Burkina Faso — a gap of $8.73 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, Burkina Faso ranks 75th by debt-to-GDP and Japan 1st. Measured per person, Burkina Faso is 124th and Japan 3rd.

Analysis

By total government debt, Burkina Faso ranks 108th 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 108.6× that in Burkina Faso ($71,304 vs $657 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Japan sits at 205% of GDP, well above Burkina Faso's 53%, meaning Japan owes far more relative to the size of its own economy — even where the nominal, dollar-for-dollar comparison above suggests otherwise.

The gap between them is narrowing: Burkina Faso's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($57/sec vs −$15K/sec for Japan), closing the difference by roughly $1,270,512,000 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 19 years.

Scale is part of the story too: Japan's population (123M) is about 5.0× Burkina Faso's (25M), 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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