The Caribbean Minus One

At its 56th Annual Meeting in Nassau, held from 1 to 5 June 2026, the Caribbean Development Bank reported a number that should unsettle anyone who reads regional headlines. Growth across the Bank's borrowing member countries, excluding Guyana, slowed to 0.6 per cent in 2025, down from 1.4 per cent the year before. Put Guyana back in and the same region grew 4.7 per cent. The distance between those two figures is one of the most consequential numbers in the regional economy, and it is widening.

One country is doing the lifting. The IMF's April 2026 World Economic Outlook records Guyana growing 43.8 per cent in 2024 and 19.3 per cent in 2025, with 16.2 per cent projected for 2026, all of it driven by offshore oil. A nation of fewer than a million people now sets the regional average by itself. Strip it out and the Caribbean is close to standing still: 0.6 per cent last year, a projected 1.1 per cent in 2026 on the CDB's own numbers. Even Guyana's own non-oil economy, expanding at a healthy but ordinary 6 to 7 per cent, looks unremarkable beside the headline its oil produces. ECLAC describes a region in its fourth straight year of low growth. So the cheerful blended figure, "Caribbean growth of 4.7 per cent", tells you about wells off the Demerara coast. It tells you almost nothing about the eighteen other economies that share the name.

For Barbados the distinction is not academic. Real growth around 2 to 3 per cent (Central Bank of Barbados) looks strong against the ex-Guyana benchmark, yet it is modest in absolute terms, and the economy is being asked to carry a primary surplus near 4 to 5 per cent of GDP while it grows slowly. The same holds across the tourism-and-services economies, Barbados, The Bahamas, Saint Lucia, Antigua, that depend on external demand now softening, and that face climate and commodity shocks with little fast growth to cushion them. Barbados has a large hotel-investment pipeline on the south and west coasts that should add a few tenths of a point to growth, but a construction boom is front-loaded and does not on its own raise a structural growth rate stuck near 2 per cent. The risk in the two-speed pattern is quiet but real: lenders, donors and regional bodies read the headline average, conclude the Caribbean is thriving, and set support against a prosperity that only one member is actually living. Concessional finance, climate funds and the terms of regional insurance are all calibrated to a backdrop the average flatters.

A regional average is cold comfort to anyone outside Guyana's oil belt. For most of the Caribbean the number that matters is 0.6, not 4.7. Plan for the economy you have, not the one the average describes.