Chinese overseas lending / URY
Uruguay: debt owed to China
In 2021, Uruguay is estimated to have owed China $0, equal to 0.0% of its GDP, which ranks it 121 of 126 borrowers in the panel by dollars owed. The estimated stock peaked at $10.00m in 2013.
The estimated stock, 2000 to 2021
The largest single-year move in the estimated stock is 2014, when it fell by $10.00m.
Source: Horn, Reinhart and Trebesch, China’s Overseas Lending. Selection: estimated stock owed to China by Uruguay, by year and instrument, 2000 to 2021. Zeros are estimated zeros (no known loans outstanding), not missing values. Methodology
Historical loan records from the 2021 release
These records come from the 2021 HRT Mendeley replication release, not the November 2025 refreshed stock panel charted above. The refresh uses the updated Franz, Horn, Parks, Reinhart and Trebesch methodology, so this table cannot be reconciled to the chart. The earlier release marks 1 loan-level records for Uruguay as part of its debt-estimate sample, spanning 2010 to 2010. Comparable commitments are available for 1 of those loans and sum to $10m. These are gross commitments, not outstanding debt stocks. The stock methodology applies disbursement and amortisation profiles, with imputation where loan terms are missing, so the commitment sum must not be compared with the stock above. See the methodology. Terms are sparse by source: interest rate appears on 0 loans, grace period on 0, maturity on 0, any of the three on 0, and all three together on 0. The earlier file also carries 10 additional project rows for Uruguay outside that sample, so they are not included in this table.
| Year | Project | Commitment, USD | Commitment, source currency | Terms | Creditor | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | China Development Bank and Uruguayan Nuevo Banco Comercial S.A. signed a 10 million USD cooperative agreement ID: URY_7 · Source: AidData | $10m | USD 10,000,000 | rate n/a | grace n/a | maturity n/a | China Development Bank (CDB) State-owned policy bank | Loan Commercial · borrower Private sector |
Source: Horn, Reinhart and Trebesch, China’s Overseas Lending (2021 Mendeley replication loan file). Selection: 2021 replication loan records mapped to Uruguay and flagged DebtEstimateSample = 1 in that release. This is an earlier source universe, not the records used for the November 2025 refreshed stock panel. CommitmentUSD is a gross commitment flow and is not comparable to the charted stock. Commitment stays in its source currency, and ProjectDescription is rendered as free-text data from the file. Methodology
Against what Uruguay reports owing to all creditors
No comparison is possible. Uruguay has no row in the World Bank International Debt Statistics table. There is no reported all-creditor stock to measure the China estimate against, so the ratio is n/a, not zero and not a hundred percent. This is a difference in the scope of the two datasets, not evidence of anything hidden. The two-sources page lists every borrower in this position.