By Nick Mann | 6 February 2012

European Union countries’ government debt increased to 82.2% of their gross domestic product at the end of September 2011, according to the EU’s statistical service.

Total government debt in the EU27 was €10.3 trillion at the end of the third quarter in 2011 – €8.2trn of which was owed by the 17 eurozone countries, according to quarterly figures published by Eurostat for the first time. The total debt compares with €10.2trn the previous quarter, a debt-to-GDP ratio of 81.7%.

For the eurozone countries, the ratio actually fell slightly on a quarter-to-quarter basis – from 87.7% at the end of the second quarter of 2011 to 87.4% three months later.

But year-on-year the ratio has risen for both the eurozone countries and the EU as a whole. For the eurozone, it increased from 83.2% in Q3 of 2010 to 87.4% in the same quarter last year. For the EU27, it rose from 78.5% to 82.2% over the same period.

The data makes clear the scale of the public sector debt crisis facing several EU countries, with four recording debt exceeding their GDP at the end of the third quarter of 2011.  These were Greece (159.1%), Italy (119.6%), Portugal (110.1%) and Ireland (104.9%).

With the exception of Italy, those countries also figured in the largest year-on-year increases in their debt-to-GDP ratio, with Greece’s ratio rising by 20.3 percentage points between September 2010 and September 2011.

By comparison, Estonia reported the lowest ratio at the end of September 2011, at just 6.1%, while Bulgaria (15%) and Luxembourg (18.5%) also recorded significantly lower debt-to-GDP burdens than the other members of the EU.

On a year-on-year basis, the biggest decreases in debt-to-GDP ratio were recorded by Sweden – down 1.6 percentage points on a year earlier, Luxembourg – down 1.4 percentage points, and Bulgaria – down 0.9 percentage points.