For Selected Countries, Debt vs. GDP

Frankly, the OECD is pissing me off this morning. I am searching for the national public indebtedness link, which is an Excel table detailing public indebtedness of OECD member countries. I used to be able to find it on their web site as table EO82 in the Public Sector section. Now it is gone and I am losing patience trying to hunt it down again.

I do have the Excel file from September, however. I put together a graph of the gross financial liabilities relative to GDP for selected countries.

The data is not entirely consistent, given that certain debt components are treated different, i.e. the funded status of government pension plans for example. However, they are fairly comparable.

The data set was compiled a few months ago and does not include all the debt that will be piled on in response to the credit crisis.

Of the 29 member countries in the OECD, the United States ranked 9th highest in terms of relative gross indebtedness.

Comments

[jdfugatini:]

I appreciate the ratio. However, the ratio is unidimensional. I find that the total debt is staggering and much larger than others. That's what counts. We owe a lot. There is no plan to control the debt and no safeguards in place to limits on our freespending regulators and representatives.

A 2nd look at the USA public debt of public debt/total taxes (inclusive of all state, federal, county, insurance...) paid by an individual (normalized to make the numbers equivalent) might be worthwhile. When I travel, I hear that the USA tax rate is low. When I've made normalized comparisons, I find that are tax rates are almost the same as across Europe.

2008 Nov 26 01:17 PM

[Lars Pluss:]

I was able to dig through the OECD outlook 84 (December 2008) and have created a spreadsheet of their new projections. It doesn't contain debt ratios.

www.freewebs.com/sangr...

other sites for government debt ratios:

stats.oecd.org/WBOS/In...

epp.eurostat.ec.europa...

2008 Nov 26 05:34 PM