🇸🇬 Singapore vs 🇯🇵 Japan

Analysis

By total government debt, Singapore ranks 13th-largest and Japan ranks 3rd-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 2.6× that in Japan ($189,250 vs $72,684 per person).

Both countries carry debt-to-GDP ratios above the 100% mark that analysts often treat as an informal threshold for closer scrutiny — Singapore at 171% and Japan at 207% — meaning each owes more than a full year's worth of national output.

The gap between them is narrowing: Singapore's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($3K/sec vs $-6676/sec for Japan), closing the difference by roughly $806,457,600 per day. At that pace — and holding both growth rates constant, a simplification, since real-world rates shift with fiscal policy — the two would reach a similar total in a rough 27 years.

Scale is part of the story too: Japan's population (124M) is about 21.0× 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 Japan 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.