🇮🇶 Iraq vs 🇨🇳 China

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 130.6× as much as Iraq — a gap of $21.71 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, Iraq ranks 72nd by debt-to-GDP and China 20th. Measured per person, Iraq is 88th and China 41st.

Analysis

By total government debt, Iraq ranks 48th and China 2nd 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 China is roughly 4.3× that in Iraq ($15,611 vs $3,594 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: China sits at 99% of GDP, well above Iraq's 53%, 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 gap between them is widening: China's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($99K/sec vs $1K/sec for Iraq), adding roughly $8,486,380,800 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.40B) is about 30.1× Iraq's (47M), 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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