Newly released datasets from the International Monetary Fund’s widely cited World Economic Outlook DataMapper platform outline a clear trajectory for Antigua and Barbuda’s cross-border current account performance over the next seven years, starting with a sequential rise in the deficit before a gradual, sustained downward trend begins in 2027. The latest projections peg the 2024 current account shortfall at 7.5% of the island nation’s gross domestic product, set to climb 1.1 percentage points to 11.6% in 2025 before peaking at 12.7% of GDP in 2026. The current account metric captures the full scope of a country’s economic exchanges with global partners, covering trade in physical goods, cross-border service provision, cross-border income flows, and remittance or transfer payments, with a deficit signaling that total outgoing payments across all these categories outstrip incoming revenue from international transactions. This measure is entirely distinct from a national government’s fiscal budget deficit, which tracks the gap between public sector revenue collection and public expenditure, a point the IMF data clarifies to avoid common public misinterpretation of the two separate fiscal metrics. Following the 2026 peak, the deficit is forecast to contract incrementally each subsequent year: dropping to 11.9% of GDP in 2027, 11.2% in 2028, 10.5% in 2029, 9.9% in 2030, and finally 9.4% by 2031. Notably, even at its projected 2026 peak, the current account shortfall remains far below the historic highs recorded in the wake of recent global economic disruptions, when the deficit hit 17.6% of GDP in 2021 and 15.1% in 2022. The publicly available IMF datasets present the high-level aggregated balance trajectory but do not include granular breakdowns of the specific underlying drivers behind the projected near-term widening or subsequent multi-year contraction of the deficit.
IMF projects Antigua and Barbuda’s current account deficit to widen to 12.7% of GDP
