Denmark's Net Wealth Abroad Is Worth 97.8% of Its GDP

What a country owns abroad, against what the world owns of it

The net international investment position is a stock, not a flow. It adds up everything residents of a country own outside it — foreign shares, bonds, direct investments, deposits — and subtracts everything foreigners own inside it.

A positive figure means a country is a net creditor to the rest of the world. A negative figure means it is a net debtor.

Across the EU at the end of 2025 the positions ranged from +97.8% of GDP to -139.2%.

The creditors

Denmark records 97.8%. Danish residents' net foreign assets come close to a full year of Danish economic output.

Malta follows at 88.6%, Germany at 80.8% and Sweden at 59.7%. These are economies that have run current account surpluses for long periods; a surplus is the annual flow, and this stock is what decades of it accumulate into.

Germany's position is the one with the most weight behind it, because of the size of the economy. It is the world's largest creditor in absolute terms among EU Member States, and the counterpart to the export surpluses it has run since the early 2000s.

The debtors

Greece records -139.2%. Foreigners' net claims on Greece exceed its annual output by close to two fifths.

Cyprus records -86.0%, Ireland -54.4% and Slovakia -51.6%, with Portugal at -49.6%, Romania at -44.0%, Spain at -42.7%, Hungary at -35.5% and Croatia at -35.1% completing the nine Member States below -35% of GDP.

That threshold is not arbitrary. The Commission's macroeconomic imbalance procedure uses -35% as the indicative level below which a country's external position is flagged for closer examination, and the number of Member States below it is one measure of how much external imbalance the Union is carrying.

Why a large negative position is not automatically a crisis

Greece's figure is the legacy of its sovereign debt crisis and the official lending that followed. A substantial part of the claims on Greece is held by other European governments and institutions on concessional terms with very long maturities, which is a different kind of liability from short-term market debt.

Slovakia's negative position is largely foreign direct investment: factories built by foreign firms count as foreign claims on Slovakia. Eurostat publishes that component of the same position, and for Slovakia it reads -43.3% of GDP against a total of -51.6% — four fifths of the shortfall, a share derived here by division. That is an external liability in the accounting sense and an industrial base in the physical sense, and the two readings point opposite ways.

Greece is the contrast that makes the point. Its direct investment position is -26.4% of GDP against a total of -139.2%, under a fifth of it, so most of what the world holds of Greece is in instruments that have to be serviced rather than owned. Two Member States deep in negative territory, and the money arrived for opposite reasons.

This is the central difficulty with the indicator. A large negative position can mean a country borrowed to consume, or that it attracted investment to produce. The headline number does not distinguish them, and the composition matters more than the level.

What it is good for

Where the indicator is unambiguous is in showing accumulation. A country cannot run persistent deficits without its position deteriorating, and it cannot reverse a position of -100% of GDP quickly by any means.

It is therefore the measure that shows which imbalances are structural rather than cyclical, and it is the reason a current account deficit in one year is a smaller matter than the same deficit sustained for twenty.