🇳🇿 New Zealand vs 🇨🇳 China

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 142.7× as much as New Zealand — a gap of $21.77 trillion. Updated every second from each country's baseline figure; sources below.

Among the 135 governments tracked here, New Zealand ranks 67th by debt-to-GDP and China 20th. Measured per person, New Zealand is 26th and China 41st.

Analysis

By total government debt, New Zealand ranks 50th and China 2nd among the 135 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 New Zealand is roughly 1.8× that in China ($28,690 vs $15,643 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: China sits at 99% of GDP, well above New Zealand's 55%, 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 gap between them is widening: China's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($99K/sec vs $449/sec for New Zealand), adding roughly $8,543,145,600 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.40B) is about 261.7× New Zealand's (5M), 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.

New Zealand 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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