🇯🇵 Japan vs 🇳🇿 New Zealand

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Japan currently owes about 56.9× as much as New Zealand — a gap of $8.59 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, Japan ranks 1st by debt-to-GDP and New Zealand 67th. Measured per person, Japan is 3rd and New Zealand 26th.

Analysis

By total government debt, Japan ranks 3rd and New Zealand 50th 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 Japan is roughly 2.5× that in New Zealand ($71,249 vs $28,690 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Japan sits at 205% of GDP, well above New Zealand's 55%, 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: New Zealand's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($449/sec vs −$15K/sec for Japan), closing the difference by roughly $1,304,380,800 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 18 years.

Scale is part of the story too: Japan's population (123M) is about 22.9× New Zealand's (5M), 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 New Zealand 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.

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