Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Japan currently owes about 126.3× more — a gap of $10.17 trillion. Updated every second from IMF baselines.
By total government debt, Sri Lanka ranks 57th-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 22.4× that in Sri Lanka ($82,632 vs $3,687 per person).
Both countries carry debt-to-GDP ratios above the 100% mark that analysts often treat as an informal threshold for closer scrutiny — Sri Lanka at 102% and Japan at 230% — meaning each owes more than a full year's worth of national output.
The gap between them is widening: Japan's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($4K/sec vs $108/sec for Sri Lanka), adding roughly $353,548,800 to the difference each day.
Scale is part of the story too: Japan's population (124M) is about 5.6× Sri Lanka's (22M), 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.
Sri Lanka 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.