🇧🇼 Botswana vs 🇩🇪 Germany

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Germany currently owes about 398.4× as much as Botswana — a gap of $3.48 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 Germany 71st. Measured per person, Botswana is 112th and Germany 18th.

Analysis

By total government debt, Botswana ranks 141st and Germany 7th 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 Germany is roughly 12.4× that in Botswana ($41,847 vs $3,385 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Germany sits at 63% of GDP, well above Botswana's 34%, meaning Germany owes far more relative to the size of its own economy — even where the nominal, dollar-for-dollar comparison above suggests otherwise.

Net of financial assets: the IMF puts Botswana at 33% of GDP and Germany at 47%, against 34% and 63% gross. Botswana spends about 5.0% of government revenue on net interest ($252 million in 2025), and Germany about 1.8% ($43.9 billion in 2025). Botswana carries the lower debt ratio but the heavier interest bill: rates, currency and assets matter as well as the size of the debt. See the full interest ranking.

The gap between them is widening: Germany's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($10K/sec vs $70/sec for Botswana), adding roughly $889,660,800 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: Germany's population (83M) is about 32.2× 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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