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

The stock is annual and expressed in millions of national currency, so levels are not comparable across countries with different currencies, but growth rates are.

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

Also known as: national debt, sovereign debt.

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

Calculate the Government Debt in Python

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

pip install financetoolkit -U

Then call get_government_debt as shown below.

from financetoolkit import Economics

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

economics.get_government_debt(countries=['United States', 'Canada', 'Mexico'])

Which returns:

  United States Canada Mexico
2015 1.91477e+07 1.83178e+06 9.8014e+06
2016 2.00426e+07 1.87153e+06 1.1418e+07
2017 2.06965e+07 1.94674e+06 1.18362e+07
2018 2.20709e+07 2.02946e+06 1.26207e+07
2019 2.3264e+07 2.08707e+06 1.30389e+07
2020 2.81514e+07 2.62466e+06 1.4089e+07
2021 2.94887e+07 2.85651e+06 1.51449e+07
2022 3.08486e+07 3.02057e+06 1.59543e+07
2023 3.29114e+07 3.10891e+06 1.68674e+07
2024 3.52945e+07 3.20199e+06 1.97489e+07
2025 3.76545e+07 3.26736e+06 2.12283e+07

Parameters

get_government_debt 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 Exports to GDP Imports Imports to GDP Current Account Balance Account Balance to GDP Debt to GDP Government Revenue Revenue to GDP Government Tax Revenue Tax Revenue to GDP Government Expenditure

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

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