El Salvador

El Salvador: strong, sustained growth, 1980–2025

Reliant on remittances from a large diaspora in the United States, El Salvador's economy has grown slowly, punctuated by its widely watched and volatile 2021 adoption of Bitcoin as legal tender. Between 1980 and 2025, El Salvador's GDP per capita grew from $787 to $5,767 (current US$), a compound annual growth rate of 4.5% — strong, sustained growth. Annual GDP growth averaged 1.6% with a year-to-year standard deviation of 4.0 points, reflecting considerable volatility and periodic crises. Structurally, agriculture's share of the economy moved from 38.0% to 4.4% of GDP (a classic decline as the economy industrialized/modernized), while services rose from 40.1% to 58.9% of GDP, underscoring a shift toward a services-driven economy. On human development, life expectancy rose from 48.6 to 72.3 years, while tertiary school enrollment moved from 10.3% to 32.8%, while the urban population share grew from 42.8% to 75.5%.

What this growth cost: Growth was not without cost: per-capita CO2 emissions rose from 0.45 to 1.51 tonnes CO2e per person; income inequality (Gini index) narrowed from 48.7 to 39.8; the poverty headcount ratio fell from 24.8% to 4.6%.