Barbados
GDP per capita to 2060, by scenario
Constant-rate scenario path; the 2060 endpoint levels are illustrative, not forecasts.
Factor profile
They earn from what cannot be sent down a wire: visitors who come, and workers abroad who send money home.
How this economy meets AI
Today’s production, workforce and automation baseline — context for the scenarios, outside the AGI Growth Index.
Where output comes from (% of GDP)
Where people work (% of employment)
Informal employment
Current automation exposure
Several parts of the economy could transmit AI’s effects. The pace depends on adoption by firms, connectivity and movement of workers between sectors.
This country is not covered by the Global Automation Atlas’s public country file; its task-level exposure work for other countries is at automationatlas.org.
Sources: World Bank WDI; ILOSTAT; Global Automation Atlas (Garg, Crosta & Baier, 2026). The latest available year is shown for each measure; vintages differ, so shares may not sum to 100.
Where Barbados starts
Barbados is a stalled middle: middling income, middling scores, slow growth. At roughly $28,365 GDP per person it ranks among the Caribbean's richer economies, built on tourism and offshore finance. But ten-year trend growth is just 0.8% a year, and the scores explain the drift. Language inclusion is 4.9 out of 5, near the world's top — an English-speaking workforce that absorbs global tools with ease. Yet AI diffusion capacity is only 1.9, and compute and energy access sits at 1 out of 5, the floor: Barbados has almost no data center capacity and imports most of its power. Physical build speed is 2.7. The country became a republic in 2021 and, through the Bridgetown Initiative, has pressed to reform how the world finances climate resilience. Its strength is people who can use the technology; its constraint is nearly everything needed to host it.
The three paths
These are simulations, not forecasts. The Modest path is the baseline; the two AGI scenarios fork from it. Under the Modest scenario, AI stays a normal technology. Barbados would barely move: 0.9% growth a year, 146th of 157. Gains would arrive as cheaper imported software, not as anything it owns. Under Gradual takeoff, growth would climb slowly for two decades and reach 3.1% a year once AGI matures around 2045, ranking 147th. At that pace the economy doubles in about 23 years — better than today, but still slow. English fluency lets Barbados adopt tools fast, yet with little power, compute or build capacity, adoption alone lifts growth only modestly. Under Fast takeoff, growth would reach 4.7% a year from the early 2030s, a doubling roughly every 15 years, and the rank would improve to 129th. Even the fast world leaves Barbados near the back, because it rewards the compute and scale it lacks. Politics could slow or redirect any path. How Barbadians and their government respond to transformative AI is a variable the model holds constant.
How you would know which world you are in
The three scenarios look almost identical until about 2030, so watch leading indicators, not GDP, and check them live rather than trust any snapshot. Three global signals matter most. First, whether the METR task horizon curve keeps doubling every four to five months through 2027–28; METR publishes it at metr.org. Second, whether frontier lab revenue and capital spending keep compounding; Epoch AI tracks both at epoch.ai. Third, whether growth in the ten to twenty most-ready economies — the United States and China above all — breaks above trend in the early 2030s. Double-digit growth there within a couple of years of 2030 would signal a fast world; a point or two above trend by the mid-2030s, a gradual one; a fade back to trend, a modest one. Barbados's own signals would arrive earlier than its GDP data: tourism bookings and spending from richer American and British visitors, new flows into the offshore finance sector, and how fast government services move online.
If growth goes explosive
For Barbados, explosive is the wrong word. At 4.7% growth a year under the Fast scenario, it would run well ahead of its own 0.8% history, but far behind a frontier compounding near 39% a year. That is catch-up at home and relative decline against the leaders at once. An economy growing 4.7% a year doubles in about 15 years, so a child born today would finish school in a country twice as rich — real progress, but no leap. Rising rich-country incomes would lift the tourism Barbados sells, and stronger wages at home would ease the pressure on skilled Barbadians to emigrate. The honest downside is dependence. If Barbados only rents computing and buys AI services from abroad, its gains can be repriced or cut off by decisions made elsewhere, and it owns none of the capability. The hedge is to build some capacity of its own and negotiate firm access, not open-ended reliance. Even at these modest rates, the pace-setter shifts to the state: the customs service, the Financial Services Commission and the courts would have to permit, supervise and adjudicate faster than they do today.
What Barbados can do now
Three levers follow from the scores, and the first two pay off whether or not AGI arrives. The first is AI diffusion, low at 1.9. Digital skills, permissive rules for deploying AI and digitizing government services carry real weight even in the skeptic's world, so this is a no-regret move that builds on the country's top strength, its English-speaking workforce. The second is geopolitical positioning, at 2. Staying aligned with trusted-partner frameworks and keeping clean access to capital markets protects the offshore finance sector under every scenario — another no-regret step. The third lever is the bet. Compute and energy access, at 1 out of 5, barely moves growth if AI stays ordinary, but under a fast takeoff it becomes Barbados's single biggest lever. Closing it means fast permits and power-and-land packages to attract hosting investment, hard for a $8bn economy to fund alone. Barbados can adapt a peer's model: Lithuania made itself an EU fintech hub by fast-tracking licences for financial-technology firms. A cautious government can act on the two no-regret levers today and lose nothing if the skeptics are right. Open the atlas's policy editor to see how moving any of these scores reshapes Barbados's path under each scenario.
Use the policy editor to test how different factor scores change Barbados’s modeled path. The roadmap builder below can then incorporate those targets into a 1,000-day planning prompt.
Drafted with Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, from the atlas’s data and an editorial template set by the author.
Create a 1000-day AGI and growth roadmap prompt
This prompt can be used with Claude, ChatGPT or an open-weight model hosted on your institution’s systems. It includes the atlas material for Barbados: the country brief, economic structure, region, archetype and global scenarios. It instructs the model to ask for local information, use existing strategies and the political calendar, and preserve the atlas’s interpretation rules. The prompt is assembled in your browser; the information entered here is not sent elsewhere.
1 · Read the brief → 2 · Set targets in the policy editor → 3 · Generate and copy the prompt → 4 · Run it with an approved model, with high reasoning effort and web access where permitted
Instructions are generated in the selected language; the data annex remains in English. Translations are machine-drafted, and corrections from native speakers are welcome through the contact links on the start page.