🇲🇭 Marshall Islands vs 🇨🇳 China

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 500069.4× as much as the Marshall Islands — a gap of $22.03 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, the Marshall Islands ranks 188th by debt-to-GDP and China 26th. Measured per person, the Marshall Islands is 147th and China 44th.

Analysis

By total government debt, the Marshall Islands ranks 190th and China 2nd 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 China is roughly 13.3× that in the Marshall Islands ($15,717 vs $1,183 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: China sits at 99% of GDP, well above the Marshall Islands' 9%, meaning China owes far more relative to the size of its own economy — even where the nominal, dollar-for-dollar comparison above suggests otherwise.

The IMF publishes no net debt figure for either. The Marshall Islands spends about 0.2% of government revenue on net interest ($397 thousand in 2025), and China about 3.8% ($188.9 billion in 2025). China's figures are on the IMF's narrow measure, which leaves out local government financing vehicles. See the full interest ranking.

The gap between them is widening: China's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($99K/sec vs $0.65/sec for the Marshall Islands), adding roughly $8,581,883,040 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.40B) is about 37630.4× the Marshall Islands' (0M), 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.

The Marshall Islands and China 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.

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