🇰🇷 South Korea vs 🇮🇹 Italy

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Italy currently owes about 3.5× as much as South Korea — a gap of $2.63 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 Italy 8th. Measured per person, South Korea is 34th and Italy 6th.

Analysis

By total government debt, South Korea ranks 15th and Italy 6th 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 Italy is roughly 3.1× that in South Korea ($62,512 vs $20,294 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Italy sits at 137% of GDP, well above South Korea's 52%, meaning Italy 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: Italy's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($7K/sec vs $2K/sec for South Korea), adding roughly $418,176,000 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: Italy's population (59M) is about 1.1× South Korea's (52M), 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.

More South Korea comparisons