Government interest payments by country

Methodology

Each ranking uses one year for every country: the latest year, up to last year, for which at least 80% of the countries the source has covered in the past five years have figures. Counting the countries a source covers, rather than every name on the list, keeps territories the IMF has never published for — Greenland, Gibraltar, the Channel Islands — from holding every ranking back, and lets the IMF's public-finance series, which covers about 150 economies, rank its latest year. No country is ranked against another country's older number, and the IMF's projections for the current year are never used.

GDP, GDP per person, real growth, inflation, government debt and population come from the IMF World Economic Outlook, revised each April and October; figures for the most recent year are partly IMF estimates. Where the IMF publishes no inflation or population figure for an economy, the World Bank's is used. Unemployment is the World Bank's modelled estimate on the International Labour Organization's definition, so every country is measured the same way; national figures often differ. Government interest payments are the share of general government spending that goes on interest, calculated from two series in the IMF's Public Finances in Modern History — interest paid and total spending, each as a percentage of GDP — for the same country and year; a second ranking sets the same interest against government revenue, the ratio rating agencies use. Life expectancy, urban population, internet use, land area and CO₂ emissions per person (excluding land use) come from the World Bank's World Development Indicators. The Human Development Index is published by the UN Development Programme and taken from Our World in Data. Population density is population divided by land area. Money figures are in current US dollars at market exchange rates, not adjusted for purchasing power.

The list covers the 217 economies in the World Bank's World Development Indicators and Taiwan: 218 in all, including territories such as Hong Kong, Puerto Rico and Greenland. An economy without a figure for the ranking year is named under the table rather than ranked. Regions follow the continents, with the Middle East listed separately: North Africa counts as Africa, the Caucasus and Central Asia as Asia, and Turkey and Cyprus as Europe. Rankings run from the highest figure to the lowest, which is not always the best: first place in unemployment, government debt or interest payments is the highest figure, not the lowest. The totals quoted for GDP, population and land area are the sum of the countries ranked, not an official world figure.

The figures are checked against the sources every week, and the pages rebuild whenever one of them changes. World Bank and Our World in Data figures are published under CC BY 4.0; the IMF figures are used under the IMF's terms of use.