World Clock / Singapore / vs China

πŸ‡ΈπŸ‡¬ Singapore vs πŸ‡¨πŸ‡³ China

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 41.0Γ— more β€” a gap of $19.19 trillion. Updated every second from IMF baselines.

πŸ‡ΈπŸ‡¬
Singapore
$480,000,000,000
Debt-to-GDP172%
Per citizen$81,356
Per secondstable
VS
πŸ‡¨πŸ‡³
China
$19,670,682,533,300
Debt-to-GDP96%
Per citizen$13,961
Per second+$25,000
In nominal terms, China carries the larger government debt β€” roughly 41.0Γ— that of Singapore, a difference of $19.19 trillion. Note that debt-to-GDP (Singapore: 172%, China: 96%) is the better measure of sustainability than the raw total.

Analysis

By total government debt, Singapore ranks 21st-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 Singapore is roughly 5.8× that in China ($81,356 vs $13,961 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Singapore sits at 172% of GDP, well above China's 96%, meaning Singapore 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 ($25K/sec vs $0/sec for Singapore), adding roughly $2,160,000,000 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.41B) is about 238.8× Singapore's (6M), 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.

Singapore 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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Source: Global Debt Clock, based on the IMF World Economic Outlook (April 2026, general government gross debt) and World Bank IDS.
Live data: /api/compare?a=sg&b=cn Β· Singapore page Β· China page
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