Which Countries Have the Lowest Government Debt?

Most debt coverage — including most of this site — dwells on the heavyweights: Japan above 200% of GDP, the US near 124%, the twenty countries in our dataset carrying ratios of 100% or more. But the other end of the table is just as revealing, and the question "which country has the least government debt?" turns out to have a more interesting answer than a simple ranking suggests. Below are the lowest debt-to-GDP ratios among the 138 countries we track, using the same IMF-based figures as the live rankings.

The lowest ratios in the dataset

Notice how little these countries have in common. The list mixes Gulf petrostates, post-conflict economies, sanctioned pariahs, and prosperous small European states. That's the first lesson: a low debt ratio is not one phenomenon. It has at least four very different causes.

Four ways to end up with low debt

1. You don't need to borrow. Kuwait, at 7% of GDP, is the clearest case: oil revenue has historically funded the state so amply that borrowing was often unnecessary. Neighboring Qatar (43%) and Saudi Arabia (32%) sit low for the same reason. Norway (44%) is the developed-world version — its sovereign wealth fund dwarfs its gross debt, a story we tell in our piece on the asset side of the ledger.

2. You can't borrow. Somalia's 9% is not a triumph of thrift — it reflects comprehensive debt relief for a country emerging from decades of conflict, after which international lending remains scarce and cautious. Haiti's 16% tells a similar story: markets extend very little credit to fragile states, so the debt stays small because the borrowing option barely exists. A low ratio here signals exclusion from finance, not strength.

3. You choose not to borrow. Estonia (25%), Bulgaria (24%), Denmark (28%), Sweden (35%), and Switzerland (38%) are wealthy or converging economies with deliberate cultures of fiscal restraint — in several cases with legal debt brakes or long-standing political consensus against deficits. These are the cases people usually have in mind when they imagine "low debt = well run," and here the intuition is closest to correct.

4. Geopolitics does the deleveraging. Russia's 19% partly reflects a policy of fiscal conservatism built up over years of sanctions pressure — when you expect to be cut off from Western capital markets, you arrange your finances so you don't need them. Low debt as armor, not as virtue.

Why "lowest debt" isn't "healthiest finances"

If low debt were simply good, the bottom of this table would read like a prosperity index. It doesn't. Government borrowing, used well, finances infrastructure, education, and crisis response — things that raise future output. A government that cannot access credit at all loses those tools entirely, which is part of why several of the lowest-debt countries are also among the poorest. Conversely, some of the richest countries on Earth carry ratios above 100% without distress, for reasons of currency, credibility, and creditor structure we unpack in the Japan explainer. What matters is not the level but the match between debt, borrowing costs, and the economy's capacity to carry it — the recurring theme of our 90%-threshold piece.

One final caveat on the numbers themselves: ratios for countries with weak statistical systems or active conflicts (Somalia, Haiti, and others carry notes to this effect in our dataset) are estimates with wide uncertainty, and all figures here follow the IMF general-government definitions described in how the IMF measures government debt. The precise ordering at the bottom of the table matters much less than the four stories behind it.