Top 10 Countries With Highest Debt-to-GDP Ratio in 2025

Top 10 Countries With Highest Debt-to-GDP Ratio in 2025






According to the IMF, global debt has surpassed a record level of over $100 trillion in 2025. The major addition in global debt is contributed by the world’s two largest economies,
such as the United States and China. These two countries collectively owed $50 trillion in debt. The US has the largest debt of approximately $36 trillion, which is more than double that
of China, about $16.5 trillion. Moreover, Japan has the highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the world, followed by Sudan and Singapore.

3 of the world's top-10 economies in the world, Japan, US and France, are included in this > 100% category. Japan has been above 100% since the late 1990s, >25 years ago

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on the other end of the spectrum,

Top 10 Countries with the Lowest Debt-to-GDP Ratios (%)

Brunei 2.3%
Kuwait 3.4%
Turkmenistan 4.7%
Cayman Islands 7.6%
Afghanistan 10.9%
DR Congo 13.3%
Russia 14.9%
Burundi 15.9%
Bosnia and Herzegovina 17.1%
Eswatini 18.91%

Russia, the 11th largest economy in the world, is the largest in this category.​

 

based on these rankings, one can infer that

• for over 25 years, Japan has been able to borrow $ , more than the size of its GDP, to sustain its growth
  • entities (its citizens/business and foreign entities) have been willing to lend it $
• Russian has been an abject failure insofar as borrowing $
  • not too many entities (domestic and foreign) are willing to lend it $

In this NYTimes best seller in 2000, ,
the author's prediction was based on China's "supposed" heavy debt load.
Inasmuch as China's debt/GDP ratio has been 1/3 that of Japan, one of the top 4 economies over the past 2 generations,
the author has been exposed for using the wrong data to justify his convenient false narrative.

if debt load was the problem, then Japan would have been collapsed way before China