🇰🇷 South Korea vs 🇯🇵 Japan

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Japan currently owes about 8.3× as much as South Korea — a gap of $7.70 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 Japan 1st. Measured per person, South Korea is 34th and Japan 3rd.

Analysis

By total government debt, South Korea ranks 15th and Japan 3rd 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 Japan is roughly 3.5× that in South Korea ($71,305 vs $20,294 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Japan sits at 205% of GDP, well above South Korea's 52%, meaning Japan 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 narrowing: South Korea's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($2K/sec vs −$15K/sec for Japan), closing the difference by roughly $1,472,947,200 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 14 years.

Scale is part of the story too: Japan's population (123M) is about 2.4× 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.

South Korea and Japan 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.

More South Korea comparisons