🇬🇲 Gambia vs 🇯🇵 Japan

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Japan currently owes about 4281.5× as much as the Gambia — a gap of $8.72 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, the Gambia ranks 52nd by debt-to-GDP and Japan 1st. Measured per person, the Gambia is 164th and Japan 3rd.

Analysis

By total government debt, the Gambia ranks 167th and Japan 3rd 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 Japan is roughly 102.3× that in the Gambia ($71,124 vs $695 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Japan sits at 205% of GDP, well above the Gambia's 74%, meaning Japan 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 Japan at 132% of GDP net of financial assets, and publishes no net debt figure for the Gambia. The Gambia spends about 14% of government revenue on net interest ($86 million in 2025), and Japan about 0.5% ($8.8 billion in 2025). The Gambia 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 narrowing: the Gambia's debt is growing faster in dollar terms (−$0.47/sec vs −$15K/sec for Japan), closing the difference by roughly $1,265,546,592 per day. At that pace — and holding both growth rates constant, a simplification, since real-world rates shift with fiscal policy — the two would reach a similar total in roughly 19 years.

Scale is part of the story too: Japan's population (123M) is about 41.9× the Gambia's (3M), 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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