The Bahamas
The Bahamas: strong, sustained growth, 1980–2024
A high-income island economy built on tourism and offshore financial services, The Bahamas is highly exposed to US travel demand and to hurricanes, as Hurricane Dorian in 2019 and the pandemic in 2020 showed. Between 1980 and 2024, The Bahamas's GDP per capita grew from $5,743 to $39,455 (current US$), a compound annual growth rate of 4.5% — strong, sustained growth. Annual GDP growth averaged 2.0% with a year-to-year standard deviation of 5.6 points, reflecting considerable volatility and periodic crises. Structurally, agriculture's share of the economy moved from 2.0% to 0.5% of GDP (a classic decline as the economy industrialized/modernized), while services rose from 73.4% to 77.2% of GDP, underscoring a shift toward a services-driven economy. On human development, life expectancy rose from 69.1 to 74.7 years, while tertiary school enrollment moved from 19.3% to 14.8%, while the urban population share grew from 73.1% to 81.3%.
What this growth cost: Growth was not without cost: per-capita CO2 emissions fell from 6.65 to 3.64 tonnes CO2e per person.
Events shaping this economy
Central bank perspective
Why the charts below look the way they do, drawing on the country’s own central bank and monetary authority.