🇰🇷 South Korea vs 🇨🇦 Canada

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Canada currently owes about 2.7× as much as South Korea — a gap of $1.78 trillion. 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 Canada 14th. Measured per person, South Korea is 34th and Canada 5th.

Analysis

By total government debt, South Korea ranks 15th and Canada 9th 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 Canada is roughly 3.4× that in South Korea ($68,337 vs $20,294 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Canada sits at 114% of GDP, well above South Korea's 52%, meaning Canada 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 widening: Canada's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($8K/sec vs $2K/sec for South Korea), adding roughly $453,945,600 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: South Korea's population (52M) is about 1.2× Canada's (41M), 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.

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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