🇸🇹 São Tomé and Príncipe vs 🇯🇵 Japan

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Japan currently owes about 13759.2× as much as São Tomé and Príncipe — a gap of $8.72 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, São Tomé and Príncipe ranks 84th by debt-to-GDP and Japan 1st. Measured per person, São Tomé and Príncipe is 118th and Japan 3rd.

Analysis

By total government debt, São Tomé and Príncipe ranks 180th and Japan 3rd 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 Japan is roughly 27.5× that in São Tomé and Príncipe ($71,124 vs $2,588 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Japan sits at 205% of GDP, well above São Tomé and Príncipe's 59%, meaning Japan owes far more relative to the size of its own economy — even where the nominal, dollar-for-dollar comparison above suggests otherwise.

The IMF puts Japan at 132% of GDP net of financial assets, and publishes no net debt figure for São Tomé and Príncipe. São Tomé and Príncipe spends about 3.1% of government revenue on net interest ($6 million in 2025), and Japan about 0.5% ($8.8 billion in 2025). São Tomé and Príncipe carries the lower debt ratio but the heavier interest bill: rates, currency and assets matter as well as the size of the debt. See the full interest ranking.

The gap between them is narrowing: São Tomé and Príncipe's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($2/sec vs −$15K/sec for Japan), closing the difference by roughly $1,265,760,000 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 roughly 19 years.

Scale is part of the story too: Japan's population (123M) is about 500.7× São Tomé and Príncipe'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.

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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