🇨🇳 China vs 🇸🇬 Singapore

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 19.8× as much as Singapore — a gap of $20.82 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 Singapore 3rd. Measured per person, China is 41st and Singapore 1st.

Analysis

By total government debt, China ranks 2nd and Singapore 13th 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 Singapore is roughly 11.6× that in China ($180,862 vs $15,642 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Singapore sits at 169% of GDP, well above China's 99%, meaning Singapore 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 $3K/sec for Singapore), adding roughly $8,291,980,800 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.40B) is about 229.0× Singapore's (6M), 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 Singapore 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.

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