🇲🇼 Malawi vs 🇩🇪 Germany

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Germany currently owes about 243.6× as much as Malawi — a gap of $3.47 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, Malawi ranks 30th by debt-to-GDP and Germany 71st. Measured per person, Malawi is 171st and Germany 18th.

Analysis

By total government debt, Malawi ranks 122nd and Germany 7th 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 Germany is roughly 72.4× that in Malawi ($41,847 vs $578 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Malawi sits at 97% of GDP, well above Germany's 63%, meaning Malawi 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 Germany at 47% of GDP net of financial assets, and publishes no net debt figure for Malawi. Malawi spends about 39% of government revenue on net interest ($1.1 billion in 2025), and Germany about 1.8% ($43.9 billion in 2025). See the full interest ranking.

The gap between them is widening: Germany's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($10K/sec vs −$10/sec for Malawi), adding roughly $896,572,800 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: Germany's population (83M) is about 3.4× Malawi's (25M), 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.

More Malawi comparisons