🇵🇼 Palau vs 🇨🇳 China

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 110996.1× as much as Palau — 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, Palau ranks 101st by debt-to-GDP and China 26th. Measured per person, Palau is 60th and China 44th.

Analysis

By total government debt, Palau ranks 187th 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 1.4× that in Palau ($15,717 vs $11,346 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: China sits at 99% of GDP, well above Palau's 53%, 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. China spends about 3.8% of government revenue on net interest ($188.9 billion in 2025); there is no usable net interest figure for Palau. See the full interest ranking.

The gap between them is widening: China's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($99K/sec vs $0.47/sec for Palau), adding roughly $8,581,898,592 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.40B) is about 80121.9× Palau's (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.

Palau 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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