🇨🇳 China vs 🇪🇹 Ethiopia

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 418.7× as much as Ethiopia — a gap of $21.83 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, China ranks 20th by debt-to-GDP and Ethiopia 92nd. Measured per person, China is 41st and Ethiopia 129th.

Analysis

By total government debt, China ranks 2nd and Ethiopia 78th 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 China is roughly 33.6× that in Ethiopia ($15,611 vs $465 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: China sits at 99% of GDP, well above Ethiopia's 43%, 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 gap between them is widening: China's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($99K/sec vs −$94/sec for Ethiopia), adding roughly $8,590,060,800 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.40B) is about 12.5× Ethiopia's (112M), 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.

More China comparisons