🇯🇵 Japan vs 🇰🇷 South Korea

Analysis

By total government debt, Japan ranks 3rd-largest and South Korea ranks 15th-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 3.7× that in South Korea ($72,709 vs $19,886 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Japan sits at 207% of GDP, well above South Korea's 52%, 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: South Korea's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($2K/sec vs $-6676/sec for Japan), closing the difference by roughly $776,390,400 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 28 years.

Scale is part of the story too: Japan's population (124M) is about 2.4× South Korea's (52M), 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 South Korea 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.