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Sovereign debt / AGO

Angola

Latest government debt 62.5% of GDP (2024, Central govt (IMF GDD)). 2 sovereign-debt crisis episodes on record, 1976 to 2003.

Country financial profile →

Full crisis history (banking, currency, sovereign) →

Angola’s latest debt of 62.5% is below the 80.7% median at which sovereign crises of the 2000+ era began. This is a comparison, not a prediction. A country can default well below these medians (Argentina defaulted in 2001 at 48.0% of GDP) or carry one of the world’s highest ratios without defaulting (Japan, above 230%). Default risk turns on debt composition, fiscal capacity, credit history and market access, not the level alone.

Official risk classification

Current classification
Category 6 of 7
0 = exempt, 1 = lowest risk, 7 = highest · as of Jun 26, 2026
EffectiveClassification
Jun 24, 2016Category 6 of 7current
Oct 26, 2012Category 5 of 7
Feb 1, 2008Category 6 of 7
Jan 1, 1999Category 7 of 7

The CRC scores the likelihood a country services its external debt on an eight-step scale, from 0 to 7, and sets the minimum premiums the OECD Arrangement participants charge on officially supported export credit. Categories 1 to 7 are the risk ladder (1 lowest, 7 highest). Category 0 marks high-income OECD and high-income euro-area economies whose credit is priced on market terms. This layer shows category 0 and a blank row as the same exempt state, so an exempt reading is not a zero-risk rating and does not on its own separate an exemption from a market the OECD never classified.

Source: OECD, Country Risk Classifications of the Participants to the Arrangement on Officially Supported Export Credits OECD CRC, free reuse with attribution. Category is an ordinal 0-7 risk step, not a probability; 0 and blank denote exemption. Methodology

Debt to GDP trajectory

Debt to GDP by perimeter, observed years only (no IMF forecast years). Household and nonfinancial corporate IMF GDD series are plotted separately where reported. Where neither component is reported, the private sector, aggregate (no household/corporate split published) is shown as a coverage fallback, not as a third private component. Shaded bands are sovereign-debt crisis years.

Central government (GDD)General government (WEO)
% of GDP

Source: IMF Global Debt Database (Mbaye, Moreno-Badia & Chae, IMF WP/18/111) | IMF World Economic Outlook Debt is % of GDP; household and nonfinancial corporate GDD series are plotted separately. Where both components are unavailable, the fallback is private sector, aggregate (no household/corporate split published). Crisis-year shading comes from the sovereign-debt chronologies. Methodology

Debt profile

Latest by perimeter
Central government (IMF GDD)
62.5% (2024)
General gov gross (IMF WEO, April 2026 edition)
57.1% (2024)
History
Peak debt
138.1% (1995)
Sovereign crises
2
Last crisis
2003
Vs 2000+ crisis-start median
-18.2

External debt (World Bank IDS)

External debt owed to non-residents, from the World Bank’s International Debt Statistics, which covers low- and middle-income economies only (Angola is classified Lower middle income). Dollar figures are current US dollars; ratio figures are percentages, as labelled. This is external debt in USD, a different measure from the government debt-to-GDP ratios above; do not compare the two directly.

$58.73B
External debt stocks, total (DOD, current US$) (2024)
79.6%
External debt stocks (% of GNI) (2024)
$10.87B
Debt service on external debt, total (TDS, current US$) (2024)
28.9%
Total debt service (% of exports of goods, services and primary income) (2024)
9.9%
Short-term debt (% of total external debt) (2024)
10.6%
Multilateral debt (% of total external debt) (2024)
26.9%
Total reserves (% of total external debt) (2024)
YearTotal external debt% of GNIDebt service
2015$48.77B56.8%$8.58B
2016$57.43B114.8%$10.91B
2017$58.75B84.9%$9.11B
2018$61.79B84.3%$11.94B
2019$62.29B96.6%$10.73B
2020$65.41B148.2%$7.81B
2021$66.02B108.1%$9.95B
2022$60.45B62.7%$15.28B
2023$57.27B74.6%$12.56B
2024$58.73B79.6%$10.87B

Source: World Bank International Debt Statistics (IDS) World Bank IDS, CC BY 4.0. Units: current US dollars (.CD series) and percent (.ZS series); repayment-schedule years beyond 2024 excluded. Methodology

Debt in default (BoC-BoE CRAG)

Stock of Angola’s government debt in default in 2024, from the Bank of Canada–Bank of England Sovereign Default Database, broken down by creditor class. The external total is $272.0M (current US dollars, excluding domestic arrears, matching the database’s published headline). A further $2.85B of domestic (fiscal) arrears is tracked separately and is not included in that total.

Creditor class (2024)Amount in default
Other private creditors$272.0M
Total external$272.0M

In default (external) for 38 distinct years between 1987 and 2024. Peak external default stock: $14.39B.

Source: BoC-BoE Sovereign Default Database 2025 (Beers, Ndukwe & Berry, Bank of Canada SAN 2025-24) BoC-BoE Sovereign Default Database, Bank of Canada terms (free use with attribution). Units: current US dollars; total excludes domestic arrears. Methodology

Sovereign-debt crisis history

Each episode with the government debt-to-GDP ratio in its start year, where a reading exists. Episode dates use the same merge as the crisis atlas (consecutive crisis years bridged across gaps of up to two years).

Source: Global Macro Database 2026_06 (Müller, Xu, Lehbib & Chen 2025) | Reinhart-Rogoff via HBS BFFS | Laeven & Valencia (2020) Methodology

Restructuring history and creditor losses

No sovereign-debt restructuring on record for Angola in the Cruces–Trebesch haircut database (1815 to present).

Reading this profile

  • Debt levels mix perimeters. The headline and debt-at-start figures fall back through IMF general government, then central government, then WEO gross debt, then (before 1950) the GMD historical series.
  • Crisis flags end in 2016 (Reinhart-Rogoff) and 2017 (GMD, Laeven-Valencia), while debt runs to 2024. “Years since last crisis” and the absence of recent crises reflect where the sources stop, not a guarantee of calm.
  • Debt level is a weak predictor of default on its own; see the methodology for the debt-intolerance evidence and the full construction.