In this article we want to understand the general government debt to GDP ratio across different countries. The year selected in the given chart is 2020. The ratio helps us understand the ecocnomy of a country better. Since the economy in the USA is an important factor and very relevant we highlight it to understand it more closely. In this chart we notice that USA is 4th highest country in terms of government debt
The sparkline graphs help offer a detailed insight into the economic trends of a country
It is interesting to note how the USA trends change over the years. Here I used a radial tree which is sorted in descending order of government debt. I highlighted USA in red since that is also the colour used to highlight USA in graph 1 and hence helps the audiences brain to immediately relate red to USA. All the other countries have been greyed out so we can solely focus on the USA trends across the years with respect to other countries. Overall we notice that USA is 6th highest as compared to other countries which is bad since high government debt signals potential decline in economic opportunities. If we look at the trend by clicking on each year we see that from 1995 to 2007, USA was still about 6th or 7th in ranking which while low was not too much of a crisis. However between 2007 to 2008, it jumped up 2 places and became the 4th highest in governent debt which is concerning
Government debt of a country is an important factor to consider since high debt results in reduced national income, high interest, tax hikes and budget cuts. It also results in reduced ability of a country to respond to security problems and poses a great risk of fiscal crisis Source[ CRFB ] . We first started by analyzing the general government debt data deom the OECD website, Source[ OECD ].The website had data until 2021 but we chose to look at 2020 so we can have the entire years data and make better assumptions. Here we notice that Japan has the hightest debt which might signal a major potential recession within the country. We also wanted to look into the debt of USA and noticed that while not the highest, it is still ranked 4th amongst the other countries for highest debt. Its ratio is about 70% higher than the OECD average which is quite concerning. Our second graph helped us deep dive into these countries economic standings by observing their trends between 1995-2019. However, it is difficult to parse through data of so many countries and eventually the chart gets more confusing than informative.
To overcome the excessive information problem posed by the above graph we create a radial tree which helps us glance through all the countries in a single view.
This also gives us an option to select years from a dropdown menu to see the trend. Here, we highlighted US in order to track its economic journey across the years and we
find that the significant change in debt happend between 2007 to 2008 where it jumps up a few places to become the 4th highest country with government debt. This makes
sense since 2008 was a period of Global Financial Crisis It was among the five worst financial crisis in the world leading to a loss of more than $2 trillion from
the global economy. Home mortgage debt in the US also increased from about 46% in 1990 to about 73% in 2008. Large US banks lost about $1 trillion on toxic assets which
resulted in loss of investor confidence and plummeting stocks, Source[ Financial crisis of 2007–2008 ]. We also notice that in 2011, US debt grows even more and it is now at the 2nd position. This is due
to the rise in budget cuts, high layoffs. However, this period also saw a rise in customer consumption which eventually led to a reduction in debt in 2012, Source [ 2011 Economic Slowdown ].
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