National debt of Pakistan
total unpaid borrowed funds carried by the Government of Pakistan

The national debt of Pakistan (Urdu: قومی قرضہ جاتِ پاکستان), or simply Pakistani debt, is the total public debt, or unpaid borrowed funds carried by the Government of Pakistan, which includes measurement as the face value of the currently outstanding treasury bills (T-bills) that have been issued by the federal government.
History
In 2008 when Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) had won the election, Pakistan's debt was Rs. 6,435 billion which increased by 135% in the next five years of PPP tenure, and became Rs. 15,096 billion in 2013. Majority of this increase in debt was in domestic debt in which external debt of Pakistan increased by 22 percent, from US$42.8 billion in 2008 to US$52.4 billion in 2013. PPP government was dependent on domestic and international lending to meet the needs of the government expenditures. Total debt increased to 64 percent of the GDP but external debt as a percentage of GDP decreased from 29.5 percent to 23.4 percent.
After 2013 Pakistani general election, Nawaz Sharif came to power. During their rule of five years, Pakistan's external debt increased from US$52.4 billion to US$75.3 billion, an increase of 144 percent, mainly due to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, for which loans were taken from China and all contracts awarded only to Chinese companies, the consequent high imports from China (not offset by any significant exports to China), and also Sukuk bonds.
After 2018 Pakistani general election, Imran Khan came to power.
“National debt of Pakistan” enters the record as total unpaid borrowed funds carried by the Government of Pakistan. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what National, debt and Pakistan can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q85787997. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2008, 2013 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “National debt of Pakistan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.