Macao
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 Macao starts
Macao enters the AGI era as a stalled middle: a high-income economy, about $76,000 per person, with middling scores and slow growth. The archetype fits. Its factor scores cluster in the middle of the pack, and its ten-year trend growth of 2.4% a year lags its wealth. Two strengths stand out. Language inclusion is 4.7 out of 5, reflecting Chinese and Portuguese roots and Macao's role as China's platform for the Portuguese-speaking world through Forum Macao. Climate resilience (3.8) and cyber resilience (3.7) are solid. The constraints are hard. Compute and energy access scores 1, because Macao has almost no data center capacity. Catch-up headroom is also 1, since an economy this rich has little convergence room left. Physical build speed is 1.8 on a few dense square kilometres holding 0.69 million people. A gaming and tourism economy, concentrated on the Cotai Strip, defines what would have to change.
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. Macao would edge just above trend: 2.5% growth a year, 96th of 157. Its gaming and tourism base would carry the economy much as today. Under Gradual takeoff, growth would climb over two decades and reach 5.3% a year once AGI matures around 2045. Yet Macao's rank would fall to 123rd, because dozens of economies accelerate far faster. At 5.3% the economy doubles in about 13 years. Under Fast takeoff, growth would reach 7.1% a year from the early 2030s, a doubling roughly every ten years, and the rank would recover to 97th. In both AGI worlds Macao would grow faster than today, but slower than most of the field, because it holds little of the compute and build capacity a takeoff rewards. Politics could slow or redirect any of these paths. How Macao's people and 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 the same until about 2030, so 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, a gradual one; a fade back to trend, a modest one. Macao's own signals would come earlier than the growth data: gaming-revenue diversification targets, the pace of the Hengqin cooperation zone build-out, cloud and hosting commitments routed through the mainland grid, and digital-services adoption across the Greater Bay Area.
If growth goes explosive
Explosive is relative, and for Macao the honest word is drift. Even at 7.1% growth a year under Fast, Macao would fall behind a frontier compounding at 39.2% and a regional median near 22.5%. Its faster-growing archetype peers would pull away year after year. The arithmetic still helps: at 7.1% the economy doubles in about ten years, so a child born today would reach adulthood in a Macao twice as rich. Rising labour demand and wages would ease the pressure on its large migrant workforce, not reverse it. The candid downside is not that AGI leaves Macao poorer; it is that a gaming monoculture, with no compute of its own, stays a rule-taker inside another power's chip regime, renting capacity it cannot own or price. The hedge is diversification with real assets behind it, built with mainland partners. Even a good outcome would test the actual machinery of the state: the gaming regulator, the SAR administration, and the Hengqin cooperation authorities that must approve, adjudicate and count fast enough to keep up.
What Macao can do now
Three levers follow from the scores, and two pay off whether or not AGI arrives. The first no-regret move is catch-up headroom, scored 1: strengthen institutions, open wider to foreign investment and technology, and widen education so the workforce can absorb new tools. These help at any income and under every scenario. The second no-regret lever is build speed (1.8): statutory permitting shot clocks and pre-zoned land would loosen a genuine bottleneck in a tiny, crowded territory. The third lever is the bet. Compute and energy access, at 1, barely moves growth if AI stays ordinary, but under a fast takeoff it becomes Macao's single biggest lever. Closing it means packaging power and hosting through Hengqin and the mainland grid, since Macao cannot build hyperscale capacity alone. A peer shows the model: Thailand secured hyperscale data center commitments from Google and AWS by offering power and clear approvals. A cautious government can act on the two no-regret levers today and lose nothing. Open the atlas's policy editor to test how moving these scores reshapes Macao's path under each scenario.
Use the policy editor to test how different factor scores change Macao’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 Macao: 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.