🇨🇳 China vs 🇧🇹 Bhutan

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 4997.4× as much as Bhutan — a gap of $22.03 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, China ranks 26th by debt-to-GDP and Bhutan 20th. Measured per person, China is 44th and Bhutan 89th.

Analysis

By total government debt, China ranks 2nd and Bhutan 151st 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 2.8× that in Bhutan ($15,717 vs $5,564 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Bhutan sits at 103% of GDP, above China's 99%, meaning Bhutan owes far more relative to the size of its own economy — even where the nominal, dollar-for-dollar comparison above suggests otherwise.

The IMF publishes no net debt figure for either. China spends about 3.8% of government revenue on net interest ($188.9 billion in 2025), and Bhutan about 6.8% ($66 million 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 $30/sec for Bhutan), adding roughly $8,579,347,200 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.40B) is about 1769.2× Bhutan's (1M), 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.

China and Bhutan are both grouped under this site's “Asia-Pacific” 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.

More China comparisons