Jordan
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 Jordan starts
Jordan is a stalled middle: neither frontier nor fragile, with middling income and slow growth. Its scores split sharply. The strengths are human and institutional. Demographics and migration score 4.8, on a young and heavily educated population. Catch-up headroom is 4.4, cyber resilience 4.2, and AI diffusion capacity 4.1 — Amman is a long-standing regional software and IT services hub. The constraints are physical. Compute and energy access scores 1.1: Jordan imports most of its energy and has almost no data center capacity. Climate and environmental resilience is 1.6, because Jordan is among the world's most water-scarce countries. Physical build speed is 2.5. At about $5,348 per person, this is a lower-middle-income economy. Ten-year trend growth of 2.1% a year is the drift the archetype warns about.
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. Jordan would gain little: 2.5% growth a year, 90th of 157. Gains would arrive imported and late, as the archetype predicts. Under Gradual takeoff, growth would build for two decades and reach 11.8% a year once AGI matures around 2045, placing Jordan 37th in the world. An economy growing at 11.8% doubles in a little over six years. The long ramp would give Jordan's educated workforce and diffusion strength time to absorb the technology. Under Fast takeoff, growth would reach 12.7% a year from the early 2030s, a doubling just under six years. Yet Jordan's rank would slip to 58th, because a fast world rewards the compute and energy Jordan does not hold. Regulation and politics could slow or redirect any of these paths. How Jordanians and their government respond to transformative AI is a variable the model holds constant.
How you would know which world you are in
The scenarios look almost identical until about 2030. Watch leading indicators, not GDP, and watch 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 signal a fast world. A point or two above trend by the mid-2030s would signal a gradual one. A fade back to trend would signal a modest one. Jordan's own signals would arrive earlier than the growth data: cloud or hosting commitments on Jordanian soil, financial close on solar and grid projects, and the order books and hiring of Amman's IT services firms.
If growth goes explosive
Explosive is relative. At 11.8 to 12.7% growth a year, Jordan would trail the frontier badly, because the United States would be compounding at 19.5 to 39.2%. But it would run far above its own 2.1% history. In a gradual world it would edge past its region's median; in a fast one the Gulf builders would pull ahead. The economy would double roughly every six years, so a child starting school now would finish in a country several times richer. Software and IT services could grow as a share of output, and rising wages at home would ease the pressure on young graduates to emigrate to the Gulf. There is a way this leaves Jordan worse off. It would host computing it rents rather than owns, financed abroad and revocable by decisions made in Washington or Beijing. Worse, data centers drink water and power, and Jordan is short of both. The hedge is to secure water-efficient cooling and firm energy first, and to bargain for owned capacity, not tenancy. Even then, the pace-setter would shift to the state, testing how fast the energy regulator, the water ministry and Aqaba's zone authority can permit, price and deliver.
What Jordan can do now
Three levers follow from the scores, and two pay off whether or not AGI arrives. The first is climate and water resilience, low at 1.6. Water security, efficient cooling and resilient infrastructure protect the economy under every scenario, and they are the very inputs any data center build would need in a country this dry. That makes it a no-regret move. The second is physical build speed, at 2.5. Statutory permitting deadlines, one-stop approvals and land pre-zoned for energy would raise growth in the skeptic's world too — another no-regret step. 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 1.1, barely moves growth if AI stays ordinary, but under a fast takeoff it becomes Jordan's single biggest lever. Closing it means packaging firm power, land and fast permits to attract investment Jordan cannot raise alone. Thailand shows one model: its Board of Investment paired tax breaks with power to land AWS and Google cloud regions in 2025. Jordan should also guard its diffusion strength, at 4.1, rather than let it drift. To see how moving these scores changes Jordan's path under each scenario, open the atlas's policy editor.
Use the policy editor to test how different factor scores change Jordan’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 Jordan: 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.