European Public Sector Debt in 2015 : €12.48 trillion - up 3%

Eurostat has just released the figures for European Public Sector Debt and Interest payments for 2015. You can find the details here. If you want to do the analysis yourself you need to go to the tables of Government Finance Statistics, and then Government Deficit and Debt (t_gov_dd).

But I've extracted the key numbers here.

Overall, EU public sector debt has gone up by over €360 billion (3%) to €12.48 trillion. For the Eurozone, debt went up by €133 billion (1.4%) to reach €9.44 trillion.

But there are large variations between countries. For example, within the Eurozone, seven countries actually got their debt levels down a bit - Greece was down by 2.6%, and Latvia even managed to lower debt by 7.7%.  But some other counties went up a lot - Finland by 7.4%.

Outside the Eurozone, and measuring debt in the National Currency Units, only one country - Denmark - actually reduced debt (8.3%). Other countries like the UK were up 3.8% to £1.66 trillion - well done George Osborne. And Norway increased its debt levels by 15.2%.

Overall, I think it is fair to say that there is no evidence that governments are really making appreciable progress on Debt levels.