🇻🇺 Vanuatu vs 🇯🇵 Japan

Live side-by-side comparison of government debt. Japan currently owes about 17475.3× as much as Vanuatu — 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, Vanuatu ranks 143rd by debt-to-GDP and Japan 1st. Measured per person, Vanuatu is 138th and Japan 3rd.

Analysis

By total government debt, Vanuatu ranks 183rd 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 48.7× that in Vanuatu ($71,124 vs $1,460 per person).

The debt-to-GDP picture is asymmetric here: Japan sits at 205% of GDP, well above Vanuatu's 36%, 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 Vanuatu. Vanuatu spends about 1.6% of government revenue on net interest ($8 million in 2025), and Japan about 0.5% ($8.8 billion in 2025). Vanuatu 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: Vanuatu's debt is growing faster in dollar terms ($1/sec vs −$15K/sec for Japan), closing the difference by roughly $1,265,673,600 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 roughly 19 years.

Scale is part of the story too: Japan's population (123M) is about 358.6× Vanuatu'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.

Vanuatu 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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