Australia vs Panama

Australia is 103 times larger than Panama — 7,741,220 against 75,420 km². Australia is 6.0 times more populous than Panama — 27,614,411 against 4,571,189 people.

Side by side

Population density

Panama is 17 times more densely populated than Australia — 61 against 4 people per km². Density is where area and population interact, and it often reverses the impression the headline figures give — a large country with a small population can feel emptier than a small crowded one by an enormous margin.

Practical differences

• They drive on opposite sides — Australia on the left, Panama on the right.
• Different currencies: the Australian dollar and the Panamanian balboa.
• Australia spans 5 time zones, so "local time" there is not a single answer.
• Different continents — Oceania and North America.

Australia

The sixth-largest country in the world and the only one that covers an entire continent. The Great Barrier Reef runs about 2,300 km and is the largest structure made by living organisms on Earth, visible from orbit. Around eighty percent of its mammals, reptiles and flowering plants exist nowhere else. Melbourne and Sydney are within roughly a hundred thousand people of each other, and which counts as the largest city depends on where the boundary is drawn.

Panama

The canal is 82 km long and lifts ships 26 m up to Gatún Lake and back down, using gravity-fed fresh water rather than pumps. Because the isthmus curves, a ship going from the Atlantic to the Pacific travels roughly south-east. The Darién Gap is the only break in the 30,000 km Pan-American Highway.

Neutral facts only. Nothing here addresses politics, government, economics or which country is preferable in any respect — population is the one figure that dates, and it carries its year.