The Economist has released an interactive map of the world displaying Debt to GDP ratios for each country. The map highlights a growing problem worldwide. As the world sinks further and further into debt at a rate of $403,052 dollars every 5 seconds, the stability of financial markets begins to come into question.

As we have seen with the most recent situation in Europe, debt can stagnate economies, skyrocket interest rates and cause high unemployment. While Greece wrestles with new austerity measures designed to bring their change in annual debt to near 0%, the United States currently is projected to have an annual debt change of 16.5%. By ending fiscal year 2011 with a deficit of $1.3 trillion dollars, we are not making much progress toward reducing the burden on our economy. (Take a look at our newest Infographic here to see where that money went.)

China in the mean time is adding debt at an annual rate of 13.2%. While the two rates are not drastically different, our % of GDP to Debt is 76.3% instead of China’s low 17.3%. With public debt added by governments each year, it is the citizen’s of those nations who end up paying the price later to stabilize their markets. With such a blatant example of what can happen when debt gets out of control taking place in Europe, we can only hope that our leaders will begin to reign in spending.

Right now the countries with the Highest Debt to GDP ratio are:

Japan : 204.9% of GDP – $11,059,346,575,343 dollars in debt

Greece : 141.0% of GDP – $349,915,616,348 dollars in debt

Lebanon : 131.4% of GDP – $57,990,410,959 dollars in debt

Iceland : 128.7% of GDP – $13,476,438,356 dollars in debt

Italy : 121.6% of GDP – $2,312,663,835,616 dollars in debtBA