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World Bank · Economy

Central government debt, total (% of GDP)

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.

Coverage
109 of 238 countries
Latest data
2024
Series
109
Unit
percent
Licence
CC BY 4.0
Retrieved
2026-11-07
Indicator
central-government-debt-total-zs
Interva ID
worldbank-central-government-debt-total-zs

Recency

current

data to 2024; catalog to 2025

Provenance

2 steps

as the publisher declares it

Versions

2

catalog snapshots

Citation

BibTeX + CSL

versioned permalink

Quality profile

This profile describes what Interva can measure in the data. It does not claim the dataset is accurate, complete, or suitable for a particular use.

Recency

100%

Latest observation is 2024; the catalog broadly reports to 2025, so this data is 1 year(s) behind (current).

Method: Compares the dataset's latest non-projected period with the year most datasets in the catalog end in. Up to 2 years behind is current — annual data is routinely published a year or two late — and more than 5 is stale. Measured from the data, not from when Interva last crawled it.

Temporal completeness

100%

40 of 109 series skip at least one year inside their own span; the median series reports 100% of its years.

Method: Per series, years present divided by years from its first to its last observation; the median across series is reported. Annual periods are assumed, which holds for every series in the catalog today.

Geographic coverage

Measured

Covers 109 of the 238 countries in the catalog.

Method: Counts distinct geographies with at least one observation. Not scored: a regional dataset covering its region completely is not deficient for omitting the rest of the world.

History depth

Measured

The median series has 13 observations; the earliest begins in 1970.

Method: Counts non-projected observations per series. Not scored: a long history is useful for trend work and irrelevant for a cross-section.

Revisions

Measured

4 observation(s) restated by the publisher across 1 vintage(s) Interva has recorded.

Method: Counts values the publisher changed between Interva's publishes. Not scored: revising estimates is ordinary and often a sign of care, and the count is here so a reader citing a figure knows whether it moves.

Schema conformity

Not assessed

No declared schema or validation rules are attached to this dataset yet.

Validity

Not assessed

No field-level validation rules are attached to this dataset yet.

Consistency

Not assessed

Cross-series consistency rules are not defined yet. The obvious first one — whether two publishers measuring one concept agree within a stated tolerance — is a candidate.

2 scored from the data, 3 described without a score, 3 not assessed. Pipeline integrity: all 5 checks pass. Assessed 2026-11-07.

By country

Central government debt, total (% of GDP) for each of the 109 countries it covers, with the full history.

Latest observations

CountryPeriodValueUnit
Albania202449.96percent
Andorra202439.98percent
Armenia202447.88percent
Bahamas202471.46percent
Bosnia and Herzegovina202439.74percent
Brazil202481.86percent
Burkina Faso202464.18percent
Canada202464.13percent
Colombia202471.20percent
El Salvador2024107.28percent

Provenance

Who produced these figures, as World Bank declares it — not inferred, and each line says which published field it was read from.

  1. Produced by

    International Monetary Fund

    Government Finance Statistics Yearbook and data files, International Monetary Fund (IMF)

    declared by worldbank in sourceOrganization

  2. Read from

    World Bank

    World Development Indicators

    declared by worldbank in source

Versions

A vintage is a dated publish of the catalog. The current entry is a catalog snapshot; checksums are not recorded yet and are shown as such.

  • CurrentCurrent catalog snapshotchecksum not recorded
  • 2026-11-054 observation(s) restatedchecksum not recorded

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Citation

Version: catalog snapshot 2026-11-07. The record labels this as a catalog snapshot because immutable dataset releases are not stored yet.

World Bank (2026). Central government debt, total (% of GDP). Interva. https://interva.co/dataset/worldbank-central-government-debt-total-zs (accessed 2026-11-07). catalog snapshot 2026-11-07.

BibTeX
@misc{interva-worldbank-central-government-debt-total-zs,
  title        = {Central government debt, total (\% of GDP)},
  author       = {World Bank},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://interva.co/dataset/worldbank-central-government-debt-total-zs}},
  note         = {Interva dataset worldbank-central-government-debt-total-zs; catalog snapshot 2026-11-07},
  urldate      = {2026-11-07}
}

DOI: not assigned (not assigned). The permalink is versioned by catalog snapshot; a stable dataset DOI is a later step.

API access

Every fact on this page is available from the API.

curl https://interva-api.nq5kq4f69b5zj.eu-west-3.cs.amazonlightsail.com/datasets/worldbank-central-government-debt-total-zs
curl -o worldbank-central-government-debt-total-zs.csv https://interva-api.nq5kq4f69b5zj.eu-west-3.cs.amazonlightsail.com/datasets/worldbank-central-government-debt-total-zs/download
curl "https://interva-api.nq5kq4f69b5zj.eu-west-3.cs.amazonlightsail.com/datasets/worldbank-central-government-debt-total-zs/citation?accessed=YYYY-MM-DD"
curl https://interva-api.nq5kq4f69b5zj.eu-west-3.cs.amazonlightsail.com/datasets/worldbank-central-government-debt-total-zs/quality

Full schema: https://interva-api.nq5kq4f69b5zj.eu-west-3.cs.amazonlightsail.com/docs

Open in the terminal to chart this series, compare it against other publishers, or export it with its provenance.

Central government debt, total (% of GDP) · World Bank · Interva