Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Japan currently owes about 715.0× more — a gap of $10.23 trillion. Updated every second from IMF baselines.
By total government debt, Laos ranks 106th-largest and Japan ranks 3rd-largest among the 137 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 national debt in Japan is roughly 42.7× that in Laos ($82,632 vs $1,937 per person).
The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Japan sits at 230% of GDP, well above Laos's 91%, 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 widening: Japan's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($4K/sec vs $32/sec for Laos), adding roughly $360,115,200 to the difference each day.
Scale is part of the story too: Japan's population (124M) is about 16.8× Laos's (7M), 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.
Laos 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.