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Aavistus Country Data

Government balance sheets, by the numbers

The hard fiscal indicators for 23 economies — debt, deficit, revenue, and the share of revenue eaten by interest — sourced directly from the IMF World Economic Outlook. No scoring, no opinion: the figures themselves. Free, no registration.

Latest actual year · 2024 · sorted by gross debt
Sourced figures only. Every number on this page is taken from a primary statistical source and labelled as such. We publish the data before we publish any judgement about it.
Country Gross debt
% GDP
Fiscal balance
% GDP
Govt revenue
% GDP
Interest / revenue
%
Japan236.1-1.537.61.0
Lebanon163.8-0.216.33.6
Greece154.8+1.349.37.0
Italy135.3-3.447.17.9
United States122.3-8.029.911.4
France113.1-5.851.43.7
Spain101.6-3.142.24.3
United Kingdom101.2-5.738.35.1
Sri Lanka100.8-5.613.757.1
Egypt90.9-7.115.855.8
China88.3-7.325.63.7
Argentina84.7+0.531.55.4
Finland82.1-4.453.30.2
Germany63.5-2.746.81.8
Thailand63.2-1.321.45.6
Iceland59.4-3.543.05.9
Mexico58.3-5.724.624.0
South Korea49.8-0.821.80.4
Netherlands43.8-0.943.51.0
Ireland38.8+4.126.41.4
Sweden33.0-1.747.60.2
Turkey24.0-4.628.17.4
Russia20.3-1.635.30.3

Source: IMF World Economic Outlook, October 2025 vintage — general government gross debt, net lending/borrowing (fiscal balance) and revenue, all as % of GDP, for fiscal year 2024 (latest actual). Interest / revenue is derived from the same WEO series. Figures are point-in-time and subject to IMF revision.

How to read the interest column

Debt level alone says little about strain. The last column — what share of government revenue goes to servicing debt — says more. Japan carries 236% debt but spends only ~1% of revenue on interest; financial repression (a central bank holding much of the debt at near-zero rates) absorbs the cost. The United States carries half Japan's debt ratio but spends ~11% of revenue on interest, and rising. At the extreme, Sri Lanka and Egypt route over half of all revenue to interest — the signature of genuine fiscal distress.

Gross debt / GDP General government gross debt as a share of output. The headline figure — useful, but incomplete on its own.
Fiscal balance / GDP Net lending (+) or borrowing (−) for the year. Negative = deficit.
Govt revenue / GDP Total general-government revenue — the size of the state's claim on the economy.
Interest / revenue Share of revenue consumed by debt service. The clearest single read on whether a debt load is actually a burden.

Composite structural scoring across eight pillars is in development and deliberately not published here — a score is a judgement, and ours isn't yet calibrated enough to stand behind in public. These are the underlying sourced indicators it will be built on.