🇧🇼 Botswana vs 🇨🇳 China

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 2518.9× as much as Botswana — a gap of $22.02 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

Net debt and interest: IMF World Economic Outlook, October 2026, general government, 2025, mostly IMF estimates. A dash means no comparable figure. How these are calculated.

Among the 194 governments tracked here, Botswana ranks 151st by debt-to-GDP and China 26th. Measured per person, Botswana is 112th and China 44th.

Analysis

By total government debt, Botswana ranks 141st and China 2nd among the 194 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 China is roughly 4.6× that in Botswana ($15,717 vs $3,385 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: China sits at 99% of GDP, well above Botswana's 34%, meaning China owes far more relative to the size of its own economy — even where the nominal, dollar-for-dollar comparison above suggests otherwise.

The IMF puts Botswana at 33% of GDP net of financial assets, and publishes no net debt figure for China. Botswana spends about 5.0% of government revenue on net interest ($252 million in 2025), and China about 3.8% ($188.9 billion in 2025). China's figures are on the IMF's narrow measure, which leaves out local government financing vehicles. See the full interest ranking.

The gap between them is widening: China's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($99K/sec vs $70/sec for Botswana), adding roughly $8,575,891,200 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.40B) is about 542.5× Botswana's (3M), 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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