Sovereign debt / KWT
Kuwait
Latest government debt 3.0% of GDP (2024, Central govt (IMF GDD)). No sovereign-debt crisis in the chronologies.
Official risk classification
| Effective | Classification |
|---|---|
| Jul 12, 2001 | Category 2 of 7current |
| Jan 1, 1999 | Category 3 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. No sovereign-debt crisis years fall in this window.
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
- Central government (IMF GDD)
- 3.0% (2024)
- General gov gross (IMF WEO, April 2026 edition)
- 2.9% (2024)
- Private sector, aggregate (no household/corporate split published)
- 4.4% (2024)
- Peak debt
- 45.3% (1991)
- Sovereign crises
- 0
- Vs 2000+ crisis-start median
- -77.7
External debt (World Bank IDS)
No IDS external-debt series for Kuwait. The World Bank’s International Debt Statistics is compiled from the Debtor Reporting System, so a country is covered only while it reports to that system.
Debt in default (BoC-BoE CRAG)
No external debt in default recorded for Kuwait in the BoC-BoE Sovereign Default Database (1960 onward).
Sovereign-debt crisis history
No sovereign-debt crisis is recorded for Kuwait in the five chronologies (banking or currency crises, if any, are on the full crisis page).
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 Kuwait 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.