🇰🇷 South Korea vs 🇦🇺 Australia

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. The two currently owe about the same — a gap of $33.3 billion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, South Korea ranks 76th by debt-to-GDP and Australia 77th. Measured per person, South Korea is 34th and Australia 21st.

Analysis

By total government debt, South Korea ranks 15th and Australia 14th 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 Australia is roughly 1.9× that in South Korea ($38,491 vs $20,294 per person).

Both sit below 60% of GDP, the EU's Maastricht reference value — South Korea at 52% and Australia at 52%. A low ratio is not on its own a sign of strength: some governments borrow little because lenders will not lend to them.

The gap between them is widening: Australia's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($5K/sec vs $2K/sec for South Korea), adding roughly $217,641,600 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: South Korea's population (52M) is about 1.8× Australia's (28M), 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.

South Korea and Australia 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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