🇹🇱 Timor-Leste vs 🇯🇵 Japan

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Japan currently owes about 29330.9× as much as Timor-Leste — 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, Timor-Leste ranks 182nd by debt-to-GDP and Japan 1st. Measured per person, Timor-Leste is 191st and Japan 3rd.

Analysis

By total government debt, Timor-Leste ranks 184th 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 341.4× that in Timor-Leste ($71,124 vs $208 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Japan sits at 205% of GDP, well above Timor-Leste's 13%, 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 Timor-Leste. Timor-Leste spends about 1.0% of government revenue on net interest ($9 million in 2025), and Japan about 0.5% ($8.8 billion in 2025). Timor-Leste 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: Timor-Leste's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($0.89/sec vs −$15K/sec for Japan), closing the difference by roughly $1,265,664,096 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 85.9× 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 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.

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