Debt-overhang theory holds that a heavy external debt burden discourages the reform and investment a country needs in order to upgrade what it sells abroad. This paper asks whether that relationship is visible in the data for two least-developed economies whose merchandise exports are dominated by garment assembly. Using the UNCTADstat revealed comparative advantage series and World Bank debt statistics, it constructs three annual measures of export structure for Haiti and Cambodia from 1995 to 2024 (N = 30 per country) and regresses them on public and publicly guaranteed debt service. No association is found. The strong relationship visible when the two series are regressed in levels proves spurious once common time trends are removed, and the differenced estimates are indistinguishable from zero in both countries, at one- and two-year lags, at five revealed comparative advantage thresholds, on a balanced panel of continuously observed products, and under an alternative debt measure. What the data do show is a sharp structural divergence under near-identical average burdens of 0.57 and 0.53 per cent of gross national income: Haiti's competitive export base narrowed from 32 product lines to 25 while Cambodia's widened from 23 to 37, and Cambodia sustained the larger accumulated debt stock throughout. The evidence locates the difference between these two economies in export composition and in the stock of debt outstanding rather than in the annual flow, and indicates that the flow is a poor basis on which to assess structural default risk.