🇲🇭 Marshall Islands vs 🇯🇵 Japan

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Japan currently owes about 198011.8× as much as the Marshall Islands — 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, the Marshall Islands ranks 188th by debt-to-GDP and Japan 1st. Measured per person, the Marshall Islands is 147th and Japan 3rd.

Analysis

By total government debt, the Marshall Islands ranks 190th 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 60.1× that in the Marshall Islands ($71,124 vs $1,183 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Japan sits at 205% of GDP, well above the Marshall Islands' 9%, 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 IMF puts Japan at 132% of GDP net of financial assets, and publishes no net debt figure for the Marshall Islands. The Marshall Islands spends about 0.2% of government revenue on net interest ($397 thousand in 2025), and Japan about 0.5% ($8.8 billion in 2025). See the full interest ranking.

The gap between them is narrowing: the Marshall Islands' debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($0.65/sec vs −$15K/sec for Japan), closing the difference by roughly $1,265,643,360 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 3292.8× 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 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.

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