Why it matters
Debt affects future budgets and borrowing conditions, but its meaning depends on interest costs, currency, maturity, and economic capacity.
People often affected
- Taxpayers
- Public services
- Borrowers
Government · observed
Central government debt
Central government debt as a percentage of GDP where a comparable observation is available.
No comparable observation
The selected World Bank series does not currently return a value for World. We have not substituted another series.
- 01Budget balances
- 02Interest costs
- 03Growth
- 04Inflation
- 05Exchange rates
These are common mechanisms, not claims about what caused the latest movement.
Limits of this data
Coverage is incomplete and central government definitions do not always capture the full public sector.
Revision status: The API does not expose a revision flag for these observations. Treat recent values as revisable.
Publisher source record
World Bank: World Development Indicators
Series GC.DOD.TOTL.GD.ZS. Snapshot retrieved Aug 17, 2026. Reporting frequency: annual. Seasonal adjustment: not applicable.
Series source organization: Government Finance Statistics Yearbook and data files, International Monetary Fund (IMF)
Debt is the entire stock of direct government fixed-term contractual obligations to others outstanding on a particular date. It includes domestic and foreign liabilities such as currency and money deposits, securities other than shares, and loans. It is the gross amount of government liabilities reduced by the amount of equity and financial derivatives held by the government. Because debt is a stock rather than a flow, it is measured as of a given date, usually the last day of the fiscal year. Central government is the part of general government that includes all administrative departments of the national executive, legislative, and judicial functions, other central agencies and those non-market producers controlled by the central government, whose competence extends normally over the whole economic territory. This indicator is expressed as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which is the total income earned through the production of goods and services in an economic territory during an accounting period.
World Economy independently selected, cached, and transformed this WDI subset. The World Bank and upstream source organizations do not endorse this product.