Government Debt Visualization
General government debt-to-GDP ratio measures the gross debt of the general government as a percentage of GDP. It is a key indicator for the sustainability of government finance and is measured by calculating total liabilities.
The goal of this exercise to start implementing the skills that I have learned in the course through online data visualization tools such as flourish and tableau. Source: The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD. OECD has a lot of interesting, easy to use and downloadable datasets, and also includes a tool that allows you a way to embed interactive visualizations directly from their website. The first part of this exercise was to use “General government debt” dataset and experiment visualizing a subset of the data.
Using Flourish and an expanded version of the above dataset, the next exercise was to visualize the trend of general debt of all the countries that have reported their data across the years. In the below visualization sparklines have been used to visualize multiple countries and their GDP debt ratio across years.
Looking at the visualization, one can definitely have some idea of what’s happening; almost all the countries are in debt. However, beyond this its really difficult to take out any other insight from this group of trends.
Take 2: A nuanced story
Looking through the data and going through the articles on the recent G20 summit, I thought why not hone-in to these informal blocks of “developing nations” and understand how they fair with respect to the rest of the world. For readers that aren’t aware, G7 and G20 nations are an informal forums bringing together the Heads of State and government of the world´s leading industrial countries.
Looking at the visualization, we almost see a trend; debt seems to be directly correlated to how exclusive the club is. The avg. debt as a percentage of GDP (Debt-to-GDP ratio) for G20 countries is higher than the rest of the countries, and G7 countries have even higher Debt-to-GPD ratio than G20 countries. Apart from this, I have two more data points here; the Debt-to-GPD ratio for Japan and Italy. Both these countries on an average have debt that is higher than their GDP itself. Last year Japan’s debt was more than twice its GDP and Italy seem to be inching towards the same.
A quick search on the internet would inform you that both these economies are in trouble. I would not go into the detail here on what this staggering debt means and why Italy is worse off the Japan but its interesting to note that all the G7 countries have huge debts. In fact, up until last year the G7 countries had debt amounting to 150% of their GDP, interesting isn’t it.