🇰🇮 Kiribati vs 🇨🇳 China

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 723138.4× as much as Kiribati — a gap of $22.03 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, Kiribati ranks 190th by debt-to-GDP and China 26th. Measured per person, Kiribati is 189th and China 44th.

Analysis

By total government debt, Kiribati ranks 192nd and China 2nd 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 China is roughly 67.8× that in Kiribati ($15,717 vs $232 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: China sits at 99% of GDP, well above Kiribati's 8%, meaning China owes far more relative to the size of its own economy — even where the nominal, dollar-for-dollar comparison above suggests otherwise.

The IMF publishes no net debt figure for either. Kiribati spends about 0.2% of government revenue on net interest ($408 thousand in 2025), and China about 3.8% ($188.9 billion in 2025). China's figures are on the IMF's narrow measure, which leaves out local government financing vehicles. See the full interest ranking.

The gap between them is widening: China's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($99K/sec vs $0.10/sec for Kiribati), adding roughly $8,581,930,560 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.40B) is about 10672.9× Kiribati's (0M), 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.

Kiribati and China 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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