🇰🇷 South Korea vs 🇷🇺 Russia

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. South Korea currently owes about 2.0× as much as Russia — a gap of $519.3 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 Russia 132nd. Measured per person, South Korea is 34th and Russia 84th.

Analysis

By total government debt, South Korea ranks 15th and Russia 21st 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 South Korea is roughly 5.5× that in Russia ($20,294 vs $3,683 per person).

Both sit below 60% of GDP, the EU's Maastricht reference value — South Korea at 52% and Russia at 17%. 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 narrowing: Russia's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($4K/sec vs $2K/sec for South Korea), closing the difference by roughly $137,030,400 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 10 years.

Scale is part of the story too: Russia's population (143M) is about 2.8× 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.

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