El Salvador
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.
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 El Salvador starts
El Salvador is a stalled middle economy: middling income, middling scores, slow growth. The label fits the numbers. Language inclusion is a relative strength at 3.9, demographics and migration at 3.8, and catch-up headroom at 3.7 — a young, Spanish-speaking workforce with room to close gaps. The constraints are harder. Compute and energy access scores just 1, the lowest of its factors; cyber resilience and climate resilience both sit at 1.7. This is a dollarized economy of 6.4 million people, built on textile maquila exports, remittances from workers in the United States, and geothermal power from its volcanoes through LaGeo. At about $5,767 per person, it is lower-middle-income. Ten-year trend growth of 2.5% a year reflects the drift the archetype warns of. Like the rest of Latin America, El Salvador sits mid-table and outside the blocs that decide access.
The three paths
These are simulations, not forecasts. The Modest path is the baseline, and the two AGI scenarios fork from it. Under the Modest scenario, AI stays a normal technology. El Salvador would gain a fraction on trend: 2.6% growth a year, 89th of 157. At that pace the economy doubles in about 27 years. Under Gradual takeoff, growth would build over two decades and reach 5.4% a year only around 2045, a doubling every 13 years. Yet its rank would fall to 121st, because faster economies pull away. Under Fast takeoff, growth would reach 5.6% a year from the early 2030s, a doubling roughly every 13 years, and its rank would recover to 113th. The pattern is the archetype's warning: even when El Salvador grows faster, others grow faster still, and the gap widens. Its gains would arrive imported and late. Regulation and politics could slow or redirect any of these paths. How Salvadorans 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 rather than GDP, and check them live. 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 point to a fast world; a point or two above trend by the mid-2030s to a gradual one; a fade back to trend to a modest one. El Salvador's own signals would come sooner: textile and maquila order books, remittance flows as the US labor market shifts, and any hyperscaler or energy deal that would put computing capacity on Salvadoran soil.
If growth goes explosive
For El Salvador, explosive is the wrong word. At 5.4 to 5.6% growth a year, it would run ahead of its own 2.5% history but well behind its region, where the median reaches 8 to 9% under the AGI scenarios, and far behind a frontier compounding near 20 to 40%. This is catch-up by El Salvador's own standard and relative decline against everyone faster. Still, an economy doubling every 13 years would roughly double a worker's living standard within a working life. Higher wages at home would ease the pressure that pushes Salvadorans to emigrate for work. The honest downside is dependence. El Salvador would buy its AI and rent its computing from abroad, priced and controlled by others, and its most skilled workers could still be drawn north. The hedge is to build domestic capacity and skills so the gains stay. Even a modest acceleration would test the state: the permitting offices, the courts, the electricity grid and the data rules would all have to move faster than they do now.
What El Salvador can do now
Three levers follow from the scores, and two pay off whether or not AGI arrives. The first no-regret move is AI diffusion capacity, weak at 2.1. Digital skills, deployment-permissive rules and digitized government services carry weight even in the skeptic's world, and El Salvador's young, Spanish-speaking workforce gives it a base to build on. The second no-regret move is physical build speed, at 2.2: statutory permitting deadlines, one-stop approvals, pre-zoned land and transmission built ahead of demand all help under every scenario. A cautious government can act on both today and lose nothing if the skeptics are right. The third lever is the bet. Compute and energy access, at 1, barely moves growth if AI stays ordinary, but under fast takeoff it becomes El Salvador's single biggest lever, and its geothermal power is a genuine asset here. Thailand shows the model: it drew AWS, Google and Microsoft data center commitments by packaging power, land and fast permits. To test how moving any of these scores would change El Salvador's path, open the atlas's policy editor.
Use the policy editor to test how different factor scores change El Salvador’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 El Salvador: 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.