What Country has the Highest External National Debt?

While no one can address the debt of countries on worlds in other solar systems, you might think that with the gross external debt of 13.454 trillion and an annual GDP of 14.26 trillion that it would be safe to say that the United States of America has the highest external national debt of any nation on Earth; however, this guess would be wrong.

What is meant by the term external debt when applied to a country? And how does one determine that figure for any given country? External national debt may be described as the total debt owed, both public and private, to non-residents of the country, which may be repaid in either foreign currency or goods and/or services. Public debt is thought of as credit or money owed by any level of the government, whether its federal, state or municipal, and private debt may be considered the credit or money owed by private corporations or private households. To determine the gross external debt (also known as the external debt per capita), the total debt of the country must be the total debt divided by the population of the country.

For that reason, the United States, even with an external debt of 94.3 percent is still only 20th on the list. Out of the biggest 75 economies on the planet, this number represents slightly more than the world wide average of 90.8 percent. Most of the countries with high external debt, though, do belong to Western-European or North American countries, with Switzerland and the United Kingdom taking the number two and number three spots, with an external debt of 422 percent and 408 percent respectively.

Of the larger economies, the country with the highest external debt used to be Ireland, with a debt of 960.8 percent, although Iceland may have surpassed its nearby island country with 998.64; however, when you consider all countries together, regardless of the size of their economies, then the highest external debt on the planet belongs to Luxembourg, at an astonishing 4,974 percent.