Similar to Figure 3, Figure 5 shows the world distribution of public debt
ratios. The ratios are divided into 15 equal intervals except interval 15, which
shows the ratios that are greater than 140%. There are only 3 countries in
interval 15, which we have shown as the outliers from Figure 4. The lower part of
Figure 5 shows some countries of interest in each interval. The dotted line is the
cumulative frequency distribution of the countries measured from the right hand
axis.
Taiwan's ratio, 32.8% (ranked at #43), is located at lower part of interval 4,
which contains 30 countries, including Indonesia (Ido, 27.7%, #33), Korea (Ko,
34.9%, #51), and Hong Kong (HK, 39.5%, #63). Thus, Taiwan's debt ratio is more
or less on a par with these three economies. Note that Singapore has 105.6%
public debt (ranked #166), three times higher than that of Taiwan.
Among other countries, Russia (Ru, 13.5%, #17) and China (Ch, 16.7%,
#19) have lower ratios than that of Taiwan. However, Taiwan's ratio is much lower
than that of other three ASEAN-4: Philippines (Ph, 44.8 %, #78), Thailand (Th,
50.6%, #98), and Malaysia (Ma, 53.5%, #108). It is certainly lower than India (Ind,
51.7%, #101) and Brazil (Bz, 67.3, #129). All the major advanced countries have
public debt ratios more than twice as large as that of Taiwan: Netherlands (Ne,
68.9%, #132), Germany (Ge, 71.7%, #134), USA (US, 73.6%, #140), the United
Kingdom (UK, 90.6%, #154), France (Fr, 98.2%, #169), Portugal (Pt, 129%,
#173), Italy (It, 136%, #174). The public debt of Portugal and Italy exceeded their
GDPs, and they have some of the highest debt ratios in the world.
In addition to the comparison of Taiwan's current government debt among
other governments in the world, we may also examine the time series of Taiwan's
government debt. Figure B2 of Appendix B shows Taiwan's government debt from
1999 to 2014 taken from NDC (2015, 32-33). During the past 15 years, the debt
have been increasing. It accelerated from 1999 to 2001 and decelerated from
2002 to 2014. In 2014, the debt was about 33%, almost the same as the CIA
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