🇯🇵 Japan vs 🇨🇻 Cabo Verde

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Japan currently owes about 2359.2× as much as Cabo Verde — 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, Japan ranks 1st by debt-to-GDP and Cabo Verde 15th. Measured per person, Japan is 3rd and Cabo Verde 82nd.

Analysis

By total government debt, Japan ranks 3rd and Cabo Verde 155th 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 9.9× that in Cabo Verde ($71,124 vs $7,153 per person).

Both countries carry debt above 100% of GDP — Japan at 205% and Cabo Verde at 115% — meaning each owes more than a full year's worth of national output. What that means for each depends on who holds the debt, in what currency and at what interest rate.

Net of financial assets: the IMF puts Japan at 132% of GDP and Cabo Verde at 104%, against 205% and 115% gross. Japan spends about 0.5% of government revenue on net interest ($8.8 billion in 2025), and Cabo Verde about 7.1% ($61 million in 2025). Cabo Verde 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: Cabo Verde's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($6/sec vs −$15K/sec for Japan), closing the difference by roughly $1,266,105,600 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 237.3× Cabo Verde's (1M), 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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