The Caribbean’s Fastest and Slowest-Growing Populations

By the Caribbean Journal staff

We continue our series on the World Bank’s Caribbean data by looking at another statistic: population growth.

We’ve already looked at the Caribbean’s richest countries by GDP per capita, by population density, by life expectancy and by age of population.

So what are the Caribbean’s fastest-growing populations?

According to the World Bank, the fastest-growing population in the region is one of the tiniest: the Turks and Caicos Islands, which has seen an average annual growth of 4.5 percent from 2000 to 2012.

Second was the Cayman Islands, which saw an average annual growth rate of 2.7 percent from 2000 to 2012.

Among sovereign Caribbean countries, it’s Belize that has the highest growth rate, at 2.6 percent, followed by the Bahamas at 1.9 percent.

Two US territories were the only populations that saw negative growth — Puerto Rico, with -0.3 percent population growth over the period, and the US Virgin Islands, also at -0.3 percent.

Note: as has been the case with most of this series, data on several French Caribbean territories and British Overseas territories was not included in the World Bank’s report.

See below for the full data table by country/territory: