🇪🇸 Spain vs 🇨🇭 Switzerland

Analysis

By total government debt, Spain ranks 11th-largest and Switzerland ranks 25th-largest among the 137 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 national debt in Switzerland is roughly 1.2× that in Spain ($49,088 vs $42,368 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Spain sits at 100% of GDP, well above Switzerland's 39%, meaning Spain 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: Spain's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($4K/sec vs $958/sec for Switzerland), adding roughly $303,177,600 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: Spain's population (47M) is about 5.4× Switzerland's (9M), 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.

Spain and Switzerland are both grouped under this site's “Europe” 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.