🇨🇳 China vs 🇱🇸 Lesotho

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 15237.9× as much as Lesotho — 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 Lesotho 111th. Measured per person, China is 44th and Lesotho 170th.

Analysis

By total government debt, China ranks 2nd and Lesotho 170th 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 26.0× that in Lesotho ($15,717 vs $605 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: China sits at 99% of GDP, well above Lesotho's 49%, 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 Lesotho at 9% of GDP net of financial assets, and publishes no net debt figure for China. China spends about 3.8% of government revenue on net interest ($188.9 billion in 2025), and Lesotho about 2.8% ($43 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 $3/sec for Lesotho), adding roughly $8,581,680,000 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.40B) is about 586.6× Lesotho's (2M), 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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