🇹🇱 Timor-Leste vs 🇨🇳 China

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. China currently owes about 74073.8× as much as Timor-Leste — 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, Timor-Leste ranks 182nd by debt-to-GDP and China 26th. Measured per person, Timor-Leste is 191st and China 44th.

Analysis

By total government debt, Timor-Leste ranks 184th 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 75.4× that in Timor-Leste ($15,717 vs $208 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: China sits at 99% of GDP, well above Timor-Leste's 13%, 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. Timor-Leste spends about 1.0% of government revenue on net interest ($9 million in 2025), and China about 3.8% ($188.9 billion in 2025). China's figures are on the IMF's narrow measure, which leaves out local government financing vehicles. See the full interest ranking.

The gap between them is widening: China's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($99K/sec vs $0.89/sec for Timor-Leste), adding roughly $8,581,862,304 to the difference each day.

Scale is part of the story too: China's population (1.40B) is about 982.0× Timor-Leste's (1M), 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.

Timor-Leste 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.

More Timor-Leste comparisons