Get the Government Debt to GDP Ratio for a variety of countries over time from the Global Macro Database (GMDB). The Government Debt to GDP Ratio is the ratio of the total amount of money that a government owes to creditors to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Data comes from the Global Macro Database (GMDB), further information about the variable can be found within https://www.globalmacrodata.com/documentation.html

The ratio is expressed as a decimal fraction (1.3173 for 131.73% of GDP).

Changed in v2.2.0: this used to be returned in percentage points. It is now a decimal fraction, matching every other ratio in the Finance Toolkit.

Also known as: debt-to-GDP ratio, fiscal sustainability.

No programming experience? With the Finance Toolkit MCP server, AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT can calculate the Debt to GDP for you. Just ask in plain English.

Calculate the Debt to GDP in Python

The Debt to GDP is available in the Economics module of the open-source Finance Toolkit. Install it with:

pip install financetoolkit -U

Then call get_government_debt_to_gdp_ratio as shown below.

from financetoolkit import Economics

economics = Economics(start_date='2015-01-01')

economics.get_government_debt_to_gdp_ratio(countries=['Netherlands', 'Germany', 'China'])

Which returns:

  Netherlands Germany China
2015 0.638 0.7056 0.4149
2016 0.6088 0.6763 0.507
2017 0.5599 0.6395 0.5495
2018 0.5156 0.6073 0.5666
2019 0.4758 0.5856 0.604
2020 0.5334 0.6786 0.7016
2021 0.5044 0.6788 0.7185
2022 0.4835 0.6479 0.7739
2023 0.4502 0.6266 0.8438
2024 0.4426 0.6268 0.9012
2025 0.4511 0.621 0.9384
2026 0.4619 0.6095 0.9775

Parameters

get_government_debt_to_gdp_ratio accepts the following parameters:

  • countries (list[str] | str | None, optional): A list of countries or a single country to include in the results. Defaults to None.
  • rolling (int, optional): The rolling window size to use for smoothing the data (simple moving average). Defaults to None.
  • trailing (int, optional): The trailing window size to use for summing the data over trailing periods (e.g. a trailing-4-quarter sum). Defaults to None.
  • growth (bool, optional): Whether to return the growth data or the actual data. Defaults to False.
  • lag (int, optional): The number of periods to lag the growth data. Defaults to 1.
  • standardize (bool, optional): Whether to standardize (Z-Score) the result. When combined with growth=True, standardizes the growth values instead of the raw values. Defaults to False.
  • rounding (int | None, optional): The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None.
Exports to GDP Imports Imports to GDP Current Account Balance Account Balance to GDP Government Debt Government Revenue Revenue to GDP Government Tax Revenue Tax Revenue to GDP Government Expenditure Expenditure to GDP

The Economics module page introduces the module, and the sidebar lists all of its functions.

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