Sovereign debt / TLS
Timor-Leste
Latest government debt 12.8% of GDP (2024, Central govt (IMF GDD)). No sovereign-debt crisis in the chronologies.
Official risk classification
| Effective | Classification |
|---|---|
| Jun 28, 2013 | Category 6 of 7current |
| Jan 1, 1999 | Exempt (high-income, market terms) |
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, and the blank status the OECD has used for these countries since 2013, mark high-income OECD and high-income euro-area economies that are exempt because their credit is priced on market terms. An exempt status is unclassified by design, not a data gap and not a zero-risk rating.
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 trajectory, 1980 onward
Debt to GDP by perimeter, observed years only (no IMF forecast years). Central-government debt is mechanically below general government (it excludes state, local and social-security debt). 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; crisis-year shading from the sovereign-debt chronologies. Methodology
Debt profile
- Central government (IMF GDD)
- 12.8% (2024)
- General gov gross (IMF WEO, April 2026 edition)
- 14.4% (2024)
- Private non-financial (IMF GDD)
- 31.6% (2024)
- Peak debt
- 12.8% (2024)
- Sovereign crises
- 0
- Vs 2000+ crisis-start median
- -67.8
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 (Timor-Leste 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.
| Year | Total external debt | % of GNI | Debt service |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | $116.7M | 4.2% | $818K |
| 2016 | $80.9M | 3.6% | $820K |
| 2017 | $124.5M | 5.5% | $1.8M |
| 2018 | $158.1M | 7.1% | $3.2M |
| 2019 | $203.4M | 7.1% | $7.2M |
| 2020 | $231.8M | 9.8% | $8.1M |
| 2021 | $278.6M | 8.0% | $9.6M |
| 2022 | $287.9M | 9.4% | $17.0M |
| 2023 | $305.7M | 12.6% | $25.1M |
| 2024 | $296.7M | 15.4% | $26.1M |
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)
No external debt in default recorded for Timor-Leste in the BoC-BoE Sovereign Default Database (1960 onward).
Sovereign-debt crisis history
No sovereign-debt crisis is recorded for Timor-Leste in the five chronologies.
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 Timor-Leste 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 1980) the GMD historical series. Central-government readings understate the general-government ratio.
- 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.