🇩🇪 Germany vs 🇸🇹 São Tomé and Príncipe

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Germany currently owes about 5496.4× as much as São Tomé and Príncipe — a gap of $3.48 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, Germany ranks 71st by debt-to-GDP and São Tomé and Príncipe 84th. Measured per person, Germany is 18th and São Tomé and Príncipe 118th.

Analysis

By total government debt, Germany ranks 7th and São Tomé and Príncipe 180th 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 Germany is roughly 16.2× that in São Tomé and Príncipe ($41,847 vs $2,588 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Germany sits at 63% of GDP, above São Tomé and Príncipe's 59%, meaning Germany 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 Germany at 47% of GDP net of financial assets, and publishes no net debt figure for São Tomé and Príncipe. Germany spends about 1.8% of government revenue on net interest ($43.9 billion in 2025), and São Tomé and Príncipe about 3.1% ($6 million in 2025). São Tomé and Príncipe carries the lower debt ratio but the heavier interest bill: rates, currency and assets matter as well as the size of the debt. See the full interest ranking.

The gap between them is widening: Germany's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($10K/sec vs $2/sec for São Tomé and Príncipe), adding roughly $895,536,000 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: Germany's population (83M) is about 339.9× São Tomé and Príncipe's (0M), 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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