Today, the world’s economy is going through a real struggle which is why we decided to create a list of 10 countries that have the most debt in 2017.
We are living in a world where even some of the richest countries are struggling with their own debt and in some of them, the GDP per capita is increasing significantly from day to day. GDP stands for a gross domestic product which is a measure of the total output of one country divided by the number of people who live in it. The GDP is mostly used while comparing one country to another to see the performance of the countries.
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The external debt, on the other hand, also known as foreign debt is what one country owes to foreign creditors. The foreign creditors can be either individual citizens of the country, the government or corporations including international financial institutions like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
You probably caught yourself questioning, why do the countries borrow money, how can some of the richest countries with the most stable economy be in so much debt? Well, the government spends a lot more money than they take from their citizen in the form of tax so they have three options. The first option is to increase the tax, the second is to decrease the expenditure which will significantly lower the standard and will put the small businesses to end. The third and the option most of the countries are choosing is to borrow money.
According to the latest statistics, the worldwide debt is about $200 trillion and it is a seriously alarming number. The world’s debt is even three times the size of the entire global economy. However, even though almost every country in the world is in debt, there are some who don’t have this problem. For instance, Macao, The British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Liechtenstein, and Palau are living debt-free.
In order to create our list, we dug deep into documents from Treasury, CIA, IMF and WorldBank to find out the debt of the countries. The list was sorted by the amount each country is owing starting from the least to the country with the most debt in U.S. dollars.
If you want to learn something more about the countries with debt, you should also take a look at out list of 7 Countries with Highest Debt to GDP.
Without further ado, we start the countdown of 10 countries that have the most debt in 2017!
