🇯🇵 Japan vs 🇸🇬 Singapore

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Japan currently owes about 7.9× as much as Singapore — a gap of $7.64 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 Singapore 3rd. Measured per person, Japan is 3rd and Singapore 1st.

Analysis

By total government debt, Japan ranks 3rd and Singapore 13th 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 Singapore is roughly 2.5× that in Japan ($180,619 vs $71,304 per person).

Both countries carry debt above 100% of GDP — Japan at 205% and Singapore at 169% — 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.

The gap between them is narrowing: Singapore's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($3K/sec vs −$15K/sec for Japan), closing the difference by roughly $1,555,545,600 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 13 years.

Scale is part of the story too: Japan's population (123M) is about 20.0× Singapore's (6M), 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 Singapore 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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