The statistic shows the national debt of Japan from 2019 to 2021, with projections up until 2029. The amount of Japan's national debt in 2022 amounted to about 9.16 trillion U.S. dollar. In a ranking of debt to GDP per country, Japan is thus currently ranked first.

Japan's economic power

With one of the largest gross domestic products (GDP), Japan is among the largest economies in the world. However, ever since the global financial crisis, Japan's GDP - like many others - has been slightly unstable; Japan even reported a negative GDP growth in comparison to the previous year in 2011 and in 2014. Still, it is estimated that gross domestic product in Japan will continue to thrive over the next decade. One indicator is Japan's inflation rate: Despite the aforementioned economic slumps, Japan has managed to maintain one of the lowest inflation rates in the world, and it also reduced its unemployment rate. Between 2010 and 2013, the unemployment rate in Japan decreased by approximately one percent, and it is expected to drop even lower over the next years.

Recently, Japan has been reporting a trade deficit, meaning the value of its imports exceeds the value of its exports. Most of these imports have come from China and the United States. The trade deficit is one of the causes for in an increase of the national debt. It is estimated that the national debt in relation to the GDP will increase further until 2020.

The statistic shows Japan's national debt from 2019 to 2022 in relation to gross domestic product (GDP), with projections up until 2029. In 2022, the national debt of Japan amounted to about 256.3 percent of the gross domestic product. An eye on Japan’s national debt Japan’s national debt ranks first among countries with the highest debt levels in the world, far surpassing the debt levels of Greece - which ranks number two - whose financial crisis has been in the spotlight recently. Italy is third, followed by Jamaica, Lebanon and Enritrea. Currently, Japan’s national debt amounts more than a thousand trillion yen and the country’s debt is predicted to keep rising for the foreseeable future, albeit only slightly. Japan’s national debt is not without consequence for the global economy, because the country claims the fourth-largest share in global gross domestic product. Therefore, the effects on the global economy would and could have a much greater global impact than that of a country such as Greece - considering its share of the global economy adjusted for purchase power parity was less than 0.29 percent in 2011. The debt levels of China, the United States and India should also be watched closely as they together make up the largest share of global GDP. At the moment, Japan’s inflation rate is among the lowest in the world, but as Japan attempts to reduce its national debt, this could change.

During the Great Recession of 2008-2009, the advanced economies of the G7 experienced a period of acute financial crises, downturns in the non-financial economy, and political instability. The governments of these countries in many cases stepped in to backstop their financial sectors and to try to stimulate their economies. The scale of these interventions was large by historical standards, with observers making comparisons to the measures of the New Deal which the U.S. undertook in the 1930s to end the Great Depression.

The bailouts of financial institutions and stimulus packages caused the government debt ratios of the United States, United Kingdom, and Japan in particular to rise sharply. The UK's government debt ratio almost doubled due to the bailouts of Northern Rock and Royal Bank of Scotland. On the other hand, the increases in government debt in the Eurozone were more measured, due to the comparative absence of stimulus spending in these countries. They would later be hit hard during the Eurozone crisis of the 2010s, when bank lending to the periphery of the Eurozone (Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Greece in particular) would trigger a sovereign debt crisis. The Canadian government, led by a Conservative premier, engaged in some fiscal stimulus to support its economy, but these packages were small in comparison to that in most other of the G7 countries.

ABSTRACT From 1953 to 1992, Japan reached the highest economic growth rates among industrialized countries. This performance was achieved despite two oil shocks and the endaka - the continuous rise of the yen vis-à-vis the dollar. This long-term growth cycle came to a sudden halt in early 90’s. Japanese economy stagnated while other industrialized countries continued growing. This was mainly due to the “economic bubkle” burst. From 1990 to 1992, the value of urban land and of the stock market index were cut to almost half. As a result, Japanese banks accumulated US$ 800 billion performing assets. This paper intends to analyse the Japanese “bubble economy crisis” and its long-term impacts on the Japanese economy, on its financial system and on its bilateral relations with the United States.

The graph shows national debt in China related to gross domestic product until 2023, with forecasts to 2029. In 2023, gross national debt ranged at around 84 percent of the national gross domestic product.

The debt-to-GDP ratio

In economics, the ratio between a country's government debt and its gross domestic product (GDP) is generally defined as the debt-to-GDP ratio. It is a useful indicator for investors to measure a country's ability to fulfill future payments on its debts. A low debt-to-GDP ratio also suggests that an economy produces and sells a sufficient amount of goods and services to pay back those debts. Among the important industrial and emerging countries, Japan displayed one of the highest debt-to-GDP ratios. In 2023, the estimated national debt of Japan amounted to about 255 percent of its GDP, up from around 180 percent in 2004. One reason behind Japan's high debt load lies in its low annual GDP growth rate.

Development in China

China's national debt related to GDP grew slowly but steadily from around 23 percent in 2000 to 34 percent in 2012, only disrupted by the global financial crisis in 2008. In recent years, China increased credit financing to spur economic growth, resulting in higher levels of debt. China's real estate crisis and a difficult global economic environment require further stimulating measures by the government and will predictably lead to even higher debt growth in the years ahead.

The statistic shows the national debt of the United States from 2019 to 2022 in relation to the gross domestic product (GDP), with projections up until 2029. In 2022, the national debt of the United States was at around 120.03 percent of the gross domestic product. See the US GDP for further information. US finances There has been a dramatic increase in the public debt of the United States since 1990, although the month-to-month change has been quite stable over the last few months. Public debt is defined as the amount of money borrowed by a country to cover budget deficits. A ranking of individual state debt in the United States shows that California is leading by a clear margin, with more than double the amount of runner-up New York. Vermont, North Dakota and South Dakota are the states with the lowest amount of debt. Even before the recession of 2008, the national debt of the United States had been increasing steadily and excessively, and it is predicted to rise even further. Budget cuts and fewer job opportunities as a result of the crisis are taking their toll on the American economy, which is still recovering. Trade figures as well as unemployment are still below average. Subsequently, the national debt and the national debt of the United States per capita have more or less quadrupled since the 1990s. Interestingly, the United States is not even among the top ten of countries with the highest public debt in relation to gross domestic product in international comparison. Japan, Greece and Italy – among others – report far higher figures than the United States.

Abstract

For the first time since 1982, in 2009, global trade flows will not grow. According to the latest IMF projections global trade in goods and services is expected to drop by 11% during 2009 and to stagnate in year 2010. The recent collapse in exports following the unfolding of the financial crisis has generated new pressing questions about the relationship between banking crises and exports growth. Are the supply shocks due to the collapse in the banking system responsible for the falls in exports? Or is what we observe completely attributable to the demand side where we have also observed unprecedented drops particularly in developed countries? In Iacovone and Zavacka (2009) we explore these questions using data, below, from 23 past banking crises episodes involving both developed and developing countries during 1980-2000.

Kind of data

Aggregate data [agg]

Mode of data collection

Other [oth]

As of March 2024, outstanding bank loans of banks in Japan amounted to around 604.7 trillion Japanese yen, up from about 577.2 trillion yen in the previous year. Bank lending in Japan Domestic credit granted to the private sector by commercial banks accounted for around 121.8 percent of Japan’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2022. Although city banks are the largest banks in Japan, loans of regional banks made up the largest share of outstanding domestic loans of financial institutions, followed by city banks. This reflects the large number of regional banks and their role in providing financial services to individuals and small and mid-sized businesses at the regional level. Regional banks were identified as main banks by a significant proportion of businesses in 2021. This was especially evident in rural areas, while a large share of companies in more urban regions such as Kanto and Kinki identified city banks as their main banks. Non-performing loan problem in the 1990s As a consequence of the burst of the asset price bubble in the 1980s and the recession in the following decade, Japan was confronted with a non-performing loan problem that lasted into the early 2000s. The financial crisis led to a number of banks and financial institutions going bankrupt, and a high ratio of non-performing loans. During that time, several trillion yen of bad loans were disposed of. To strengthen the financial system and establish regularities for dealing with failing financial institutions, the Financial Reconstruction Act (FRA) was passed in 1998. In more recent years, the non-performing loan ratio of banks has stood at around one percent.

As of March 2024, the non-performing loan (NPL) ratio of banks in Japan stood at 1.3 percent. Loans categorized as doubtful accounted for the largest share of non-performing loans. The NPL ratio shows the ratio of bad loans to total loans. Japan experienced a period of high non-performing loan ratios as a result of the financial crisis caused by the burst of the economic bubble in the 1990s.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION: Replication package for “Budget deficits and money creation: Exploring their relation before Bretton Woods”, to be published in Explorations in Economic History (accepted December 2018). Panel of seventeen countries from 1870 to 1938. Ten countries are sometimes-floaters before the WWI: Argentina, Bulgaria, Brazil, Chile, Greece, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Romania and Spain. Seven countries are never-floaters before the WWI: Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the USA. Equation8.dta (Stata format): Data of public budget, monetary base and nominal GDP. Replication program Equation 8 offers a dynamic heterogeneous estimation of variations in the monetary base on the budget balance. Equation9.dta (Stata format): Data of variations in the monetary base, real GDP per capita( in 1990 Geary-Khamis dollars), average of public spending level , standard deviation of public spending levels, ratio of debt to nominal GDP and number of cabinet changes per year. Replication program Equation 9 offers a dynamic panel estimation of variations in the monetary base on the rest of variables. Abstract of the paper: The sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone has rekindled the use of the North-South (core-periphery) terminology to refer to the heterogeneity of countries belonging to the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). In the gold standard literature, this geographical partition had already been employed to oppose the fiscal profligacy and subsequent problems of convertibility of southern countries against the fiscal probity and long convertibility records of their northern counterparts. We provide statistical evidence that the group of countries that, with available data for 1870-1938, exhibited convertibility problems during the classical gold standard, for this reason called the pre-WWI sometimes-floaters, shared a pattern of fiscal dominance. This finding for the sometimes-floaters (southern European and South American countries plus Japan) differs from the non-fiscal dominance pattern that we obtain for the pre-WWI never-floaters (northern Europe and North America countries) when the Great War and its aftermath years are omitted. We also show that the presence of fiscal dominance was partly due to the lower levels of tax efficiency and political stability in the South.

This study explores the effects of banking uncertainty on firms’ debt financing. Employing data from 2007 to 2022 of Vietnam–a bank-based economy, we document that banking uncertainty negatively impacts corporate debt. The impact firmly holds across various debt maturities and sources, with the most predominant driver witnessed in bank debt. We also investigate the potential underlying mechanism linking banking uncertainty to debt financing, thereby validating the working of three crucial channels, including increased costs of debt, substitution of trade credit, and contractions in firm investment. Furthermore, conducting extended analysis, we find that debt financing exhibits more pronounced reactions to banking uncertainty for firms with closer ties to banks or during macroeconomic shocks, as captured by the financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings survive after robustness checks by alternative measurement, static and dynamic econometric models, and endogeneity controls.

Decomposing corporate debt: Long-term versus short-term debt.

The growing trend of interdependence between the international stock markets indicated the amalgamation of risk across borders that plays a significant role in portfolio diversification by selecting different assets from the financial markets and is also helpful for making extensive economic policy for the economies. By applying different methodologies, this study undertakes the volatility analysis of the emerging and OECD economies and analyzes the co-movement pattern between them. Moreover, with that motive, using the wavelet approach, we provide strong evidence of the short and long-run risk transfer over different time domains from Malaysia to its trading partners. Our findings show that during the Asian financial crisis (1997–98), Malaysia had short- and long-term relationships with China, Germany, Japan, Singapore, the UK, and Indonesia due to both high and low-frequency domains. Meanwhile, after the Global financial crisis (2008–09), it is being observed that Malaysia has long-term and short-term synchronization with emerging (China, India, Indonesia), OECD (Germany, France, USA, UK, Japan, Singapore) stock markets but Pakistan has the low level of co-movement with Malaysian stock market during the global financial crisis (2008–09). Moreover, it is being seen that Malaysia has short-term at both high and low-frequency co-movement with all the emerging and OECD economies except Japan, Singapore, and Indonesia during the COVID-19 period (2020–21). Japan, Singapore, and Indonesia have long-term synchronization relationships with the Malaysian stock market at high and low frequencies during COVID-19. While in a leading-lagging relationship, Malaysia’s stock market risk has both leading and lagging behavior with its trading partners’ stock market risk in the selected period; this behavior changes based on the different trade and investment flow factors. Moreover, DCC-GARCH findings shows that Malaysian market has both short term and long-term synchronization with trading partners except USA. Conspicuously, the integration pattern seems that the cooperation development between stock markets matters rather than the regional proximity in driving the cointegration. The study findings have significant implications for investors, governments, and policymakers around the globe.

In 2018, Germany’s GDP peaked at around four billion U.S. dollars, the highest GDP the country has reported in decades. It is predicted to grow towards 5.57 billion by 2029. Germany has the fourth-largest GDP in the world, after the United States, China, and Japan. The national debt of Germany has steadily been falling since 2012 and is now about a quarter of the size of Japan’s and half that of the United States. Development of GDP per capita Gross domestic product per capita in Germany has been increasing since 2015 and experienced its last period of decline between the mid-nineties and early noughties. In 2001, GDP per capita was the lowest it had been since the early nineties, but more than doubled by the time of the financial crisis in 2008. GDP per capita fluctuated throughout the subsequent decade, before reaching around 48,000 U.S. dollars in 2018. Largest economic sectors The service sector generates the highest share of GDP in Germany at nearly 70 percent. Finance and telecommunications are a large part of the service sector, as well as tourism – including hospitality and accommodation. Roughly a quarter of GDP currently comes from the production industry, not including construction. Agriculture, fishing, and forestry make up less than one percent.

The gross domestic product of the United Kingdom was around 2.56 trillion British pounds, an increase when compared to the previous year, when UK GDP amounted to about 2.54 trillion pounds. The significant drop in GDP visible in 2020 was due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the smaller declines in 2008 and 2009 because of the global financial crisis of the late 2000s. Low growth problem in the UK Despite growing by 0.9 percent in 2024, and 0.4 percent in 2023 the UK economy is not that much larger than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic. Since recovering from a huge fall in GDP in the second quarter of 2020, the UK economy has alternated between periods of contraction and low growth, with the UK even in a recession at the end of 2023. While economic growth picked up somewhat in 2024, GDP per capita is lower than it was in 2022, following two years of negative growth. How big is the UK economy in relation to the rest of the world? As of 2024, the UK had the sixth-largest economy in the world, behind the United States, China, Japan, Germany, and India. Among European nations, this meant that the UK currently has the second-largest economy in Europe, although the economy of France, Europe's third-largest economy, is of a similar size. The UK's global economic ranking will likely fall in the coming years, however, with the UK's share of global GDP expected to fall from 2.16 percent in 2025 to 2.02 percent by 2029.  

Japan recorded the lowest growth rate in average wages of the three advanced major economies included here over recent years. However, wages growth started increasing more in June and July 2024. The wage growth in both Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States stood at around four percent in July that year.

As of November 2021, the U.S. goverment dedicated 26.46 percent of the GDP to soften the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. This translates to stimulus packages worth 5.54 trillion U.S. dollars

Economic impact of the Coronavirus pandemic

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was felt throughout the whole world. Lockdowns forced many industries to close completely for many months and restrictions were put on almost all economic activity. In 2020, the worldwide GDP loss due to Covid was 6.7 percent. The global unemployment rate rocketed to 6.47 percent in 2020 and confidence in governments’ ability to deal with the crisis diminished significantly.

Governmental response

In order to stimulate the economies and bring them out of recession, many countries have decided to release so called stimulus packages. These are fiscal and monetary policies used to support the recovery process. Through application of lower taxes and interest rates, direct financial aid, or facilitated access to funding, the governments aim to boost the employment, investment, and demand.

Stimulus packages

Until November 2021, Japan has dedicated the largest share of the GDP to stimulus packages among the G20 countries, with 53.69 percent (308 trillion Yen or 2.71 trillion U.S. dollars). While the first help package aimed at maintaining employment and securing businesses, the second and third ones focused more on structural changes and positive developments in the country in the post-pandemic future.

This statistic shows the trade balance of goods of Saudi Arabia from 2013 to 2023. In 2023, Saudi Arabia's trade balance surplus amounted to approximately 113.08 billion years. Saudi Arabia's economic state Saudi Arabia’s positive trade balance dropped during the economic crisis, recovered thereafter, but has faltered somewhat in the past couple of years. This is likely due to a loss in export income associated with falling crude oil prices in the region. This has affected the economy and is expected to increase the country’s national debt. As a major oil producer and exporter, on the one hand Saudi Arabia needs to maintain international relations related to the export of its most precious resource, and on the other hand it needs to preserve stability in the region. For the most part, the country has been able to do so. Due to large oil reserves throughout the region, Saudi Arabia’s most important export partners include China, the United States, Japan, South Korea, India and Singapore. As one of the main oil producers worldwide and ranked among the countries with the largest GDP, Saudi Arabia remains one of the key players in the Muslim and Arab world. It is also home to the birthplace of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed, giving the country a special significance. However, as tension rise with Iran, an uneasy relationship based in religion, politics and history, preserving stability in the region and international relations may become a challenge.