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.