Public debt and public spending in real time, the debt/GDP ratio, and 10-year borrowing rates, with a country-by-country zoom on all 21 euro-area countries.
Open the live dashboard → Opens the “GDP & Debt” tab on moneyprinter.uk directlyTwo lines rebased to 100 on January 1, GDP and debt: whichever climbs faster is growing quicker this year, showing whether the ratio is improving or worsening.
For the euro area, the same figures are available individually for each of the 21 countries, plus each country's 10-year borrowing rate (data updated continuously, so not reproduced here).
GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is the total value of everything a country produces in a year: every good made, every service sold, every hour of paid work. Think of it as a country's yearly paycheck. It's measured over a year, but published quarterly by statistics offices, always expressed at an annual rate, as if the current quarter repeated for a full 12 months.
This is the standard measure for comparing debt levels across countries of different sizes. The debt figure used is gross general government debt (federal/central, state/provincial, and local combined), divided by nominal GDP (current prices, not adjusted for inflation). The dashboard also shows a since-January-1 comparison: if debt grows faster than GDP over the year, the ratio worsens; if GDP grows faster, it improves.
This is the interest rate a government pays to borrow on bond markets over a 10-year term. It's a key indicator of market confidence: the higher this rate, the more expensive borrowing becomes for the government, which weighs directly on the following years' budget. The dashboard tracks it individually for each of the 21 euro-area countries, making it possible to see which ones are borrowing on more or less favorable terms at the same moment.
There is no threshold beyond which everything collapses. What matters more is the direction the ratio is heading, the rate at which the country borrows, and the currency its debt is issued in. A heavily indebted country borrowing cheaply in its own currency is not in the position of a less indebted one borrowing expensively in a foreign currency. That is why the dashboard shows the ratio and the 10-year rate side by side rather than the ratio alone.
By dividing gross general government debt (all levels of government combined) by nominal GDP. It's the standard measure for comparing debt levels across countries of different sizes.
For three reasons. Scope first: the central government's debt alone is smaller than that of all public administrations, local authorities and social security included. Definition next: gross debt does not deduct the financial assets held, unlike net debt. Timing last: quarterly releases are revised afterwards. This dashboard uses gross general government debt, and says so under every chart.