🇳🇿 New Zealand vs 🇨🇳 China

Analysis

By total government debt, New Zealand ranks 52nd-largest and China ranks 2nd-largest among the 137 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 national debt in New Zealand is roughly 2.0× that in China ($30,005 vs $15,216 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 ($89K/sec vs $517/sec for New Zealand), adding roughly $7,656,076,800 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.41B) is about 276.3× 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.