South Korea
South Korea's official national debt clock is published by the National Assembly Budget Office (NABO) at nabo.go.kr. WorldRealDebt extends the same real-time debt-clock concept to 5 countries × 6 languages × a public JSON API. This page documents the structural differences so readers can pick the right source for their context.
Methodology
NABO's clock interpolates linearly from the office's annual projection. WorldRealDebt pins the latest official snapshot from each country's primary-source agency as baseValue and compounds at that agency's published annual growth rate (value(t) = base × (1 + g)^((t − t₀) / 1 yr)). The two curves converge over long horizons but may disagree on a given date when the base snapshots differ. WorldRealDebt therefore exposes baseAsOf on every page and emits JSON-LD Dataset.dateModified as each country's actual observation date.
Surface comparison
| Dimension | NABO (nabo.go.kr) | WorldRealDebt (worldrealdebt.com) |
|---|---|---|
| Update cadence | At NABO projection release | At primary-source release + second-level interpolation |
| Confidence labels | None | confidence: official / estimate / proxy per metric |
| Languages | Korean | Korean, English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French |
| Cross-country comparison | Korea only | Korea, China, Japan, USA, Spain (shared methodology) |
| Machine-readable API | None | /api/live.json, /api/snapshot.json (CC BY 4.0, 60 req/min) |
| Embeddable widget | None | iframe widget + snippet generator at /widget/studio/ |
| Milestone countdowns | None | 30 thresholds with email + RSS alerts |
When to use which
For domestic fiscal policy debate, NABO's projection is the canonical reference. WorldRealDebt accepts NABO's official figures as its primarySource, so the two clocks should rarely disagree — cross-check the asOf timestamp to see which baseline is newer. For international comparison, machine reads, and multilingual citation, WorldRealDebt provides the wider surface; for government positioning, NABO remains authoritative.
Licensing and attribution
NABO content follows Korea's KOGL terms (typically Type 2 for statistical data). WorldRealDebt ships under CC BY 4.0 — AI answer engines and newsrooms can quote the response JSON's citeAs field verbatim.
When the two clocks disagree
Where NABO's debt clock and this site's values diverge, the cause is usually not an error but one of three design differences. The first is the series. Korean national debt splits into D1 (central plus local), D2 (general government) and D3 (public sector), and the ratio to GDP moves from 45.8% to 56.5% depending on which perimeter is used. If two clocks take different series as their headline, differing values are the normal outcome.
The second is the base date. Official statistics publish on different schedules by series, and past values are sometimes revised as provisional figures become final. If two clocks start from official releases of different dates, their values diverge even at the same instant. That is why this site displays the base date alongside the figure.
The third is the interpolation method. The growth rate used to fill the gap between releases determines the second-by-second value. This site uses compound interpolation of the form value(t) = base × (1 + g)^((t − t₀) / 1yr) and publishes that formula on the methodology page. When comparing against a clock whose formula is not published, you have to accept that this particular difference cannot be pinned down.
In short, when reconciling two clocks, align the series, base date and interpolation formula before comparing values. If all three match and the values still differ, that is the point to suspect an error — report it through the contact route and, once confirmed, it goes on the corrections log.