🇱🇸 Lesotho vs 🇯🇵 Japan

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Japan currently owes about 6033.7× as much as Lesotho — a gap of $8.72 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

Net debt and interest: IMF World Economic Outlook, October 2026, general government, 2025, mostly IMF estimates. A dash means no comparable figure. How these are calculated.

Among the 194 governments tracked here, Lesotho ranks 111th by debt-to-GDP and Japan 1st. Measured per person, Lesotho is 170th and Japan 3rd.

Analysis

By total government debt, Lesotho ranks 170th and Japan 3rd among the 194 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 117.5× that in Lesotho ($71,124 vs $605 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Japan sits at 205% of GDP, well above Lesotho's 49%, meaning Japan owes far more relative to the size of its own economy — even where the nominal, dollar-for-dollar comparison above suggests otherwise.

Net of financial assets: the IMF puts Lesotho at 9% of GDP and Japan at 132%, against 49% and 205% gross. Lesotho spends about 2.8% of government revenue on net interest ($43 million in 2025), and Japan about 0.5% ($8.8 billion in 2025). Lesotho carries the lower debt ratio but the heavier interest bill: rates, currency and assets matter as well as the size of the debt. See the full interest ranking.

The gap between them is narrowing: Lesotho's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($3/sec vs −$15K/sec for Japan), closing the difference by roughly $1,265,846,400 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 19 years.

Scale is part of the story too: Japan's population (123M) is about 51.3× Lesotho's (2M), 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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