Caribbean Development Trends

We would like to extend our gratitude to Ruth Houliston, Vashtie Dookiesingh, Smeldy Ramirez, Lisandra Rickards, Maria Niles, Genesia Tucker, Jean Emmanuel Desmornes and Simon Johnson for their contributions to this blog.

Coordinated efforts to solve critical shared challenges in the Caribbean is an urgent mandate for improving lives in the region. Heeding this call from Caribbean governments, the IDB, IDB Invest and IDB Lab introduced in 2024 a strategic framework and regional program, ONE Caribbean. 

An Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) study projects that by 2050, more than one in five individuals in The Bahamas, Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago will have a disability. The increase of 5.9 percentage points from the 2020 projection is significant. Given the fast-aging population, this demographic shift highlights the need for urgent action.

Albeit at different rates, Caribbean countries have seen their populations gradually age over time. This is the result of several factors including falling fertility rates, emigration of its working population and increasing life expectancies.

As Suriname continues its path of recovery from a prolonged economic crisis, the urgent issue of poverty remains a critical challenge. While the country has made strides, poverty still affects 17.5% of the population, with 1.1% living in extreme poverty. As we recognize Poverty Day, we are reminded of the global mission articulated by the World Bank: "to create a world free of poverty on a livable planet." And it reinforces the core objective of IDBStrategy+ to reduce poverty and inequality in the region.

Recently, seven Caribbean countries—Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Guyana, Jamaica, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago—met in Kingston, Jamaica, for Caribbean Connect: Building the Pan-American Highway for Digital Health.

May marked Mental Health Awareness Month, a crucial period for spotlighting mental health issues and combating associated stigmas. Recognizing that mental health is as vital as physical well-being is paramount.

Serious financing problems are a major concern of social security policy makers around the world. Global trends such as population aging, diminishing job stability and a secular decline in interest rates have exacerbated pressures on many systems that are struggling to fulfil their social mandates of poverty alleviation and income smoothing. Caribbean social insurance systems -commonly referred to as social security systems around the world- are not exempt from these pressures. In fact, as discussed below, they face specific challenges surpassing those encountered elsewhere.

There is growing concern about the debt sustainability of Caribbean countries, particularly in the wake of the pandemic, which led to sharply increased deficits.

The Caribbean region has made considerable progress in terms of access to education, achieving virtually universal primary school enrollment and similar levels of educational attainment relative to comparable countries. However, there are persistent learning inequalities throughout students’ life cycles as they progress from primary to secondary and tertiary education. Moreover, there are growing gender gaps that leave males behind in terms of educational attainment.