🇨🇭 Switzerland vs 🇹🇷 Turkey

Analysis

By total government debt, Switzerland ranks 25th-largest and Turkey ranks 27th-largest among the 137 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 national debt in Switzerland is roughly 10.3× that in Turkey ($49,088 vs $4,747 per person).

Both sit below the 60%-of-GDP mark sometimes cited as a conservative debt benchmark (echoing the EU's original Maastricht reference value) — Switzerland at 39% and Turkey at 23% — suggesting comparatively limited sustainability pressure by this measure alone.

The gap between them is narrowing: Turkey's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($1K/sec vs $958/sec for Switzerland), closing the difference by roughly $37,238,400 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 a rough 2 years.

Scale is part of the story too: Turkey's population (85M) is about 9.7× Switzerland's (9M), 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.

Switzerland and Turkey are both grouped under this site's “Europe” region, so this is, in effect, an intra-regional comparison as well.

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