🇯🇵 Japan vs 🇦🇺 Australia

Analysis

By total government debt, Japan ranks 3rd-largest and Australia ranks 14th-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 Japan is roughly 1.9× that in Australia ($72,709 vs $38,662 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Japan sits at 207% of GDP, well above Australia's 51%, 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 gap between them is narrowing: Australia's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($4K/sec vs $-6676/sec for Japan), closing the difference by roughly $950,918,400 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 a rough 23 years.

Scale is part of the story too: Japan's population (124M) is about 4.6× Australia's (27M), 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.

Japan and Australia 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.