Against a backdrop of mounting global economic volatility and escalating climate-related risks, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has laid out a comprehensive roadmap of targeted long-term reforms designed to lift Antigua and Barbuda’s global competitiveness, reinforce financial governance, and harden the small island nation against future economic shocks.
The recommendations are outlined in the IMF’s latest Article IV consultation, a regular statutory assessment of member states’ economic health and policy frameworks. In the document, fund directors emphasize that upgrading domestic connectivity is a critical foundational step to unlock growth in trade, tourism—Antigua and Barbuda’s historic economic backbone—and boost the country’s overall competitive standing in the Caribbean region. To complement infrastructure improvements, the IMF urges the Antiguan government to streamline inefficient port and customs clearance procedures, while adopting a rigorous approach to prioritizing public infrastructure projects to avoid wasteful spending and unsustainable debt burdens.
One pressing bottleneck highlighted by the consultation is the country’s persistent skills gap. IMF directors warn that without targeted intervention to address workforce shortages, the constraint will drag on medium and long-term economic expansion, limiting the country’s ability to capitalize on growth opportunities in key sectors.
Beyond competitiveness and labor market adjustments, the IMF places significant emphasis on strengthening regulation of the domestic financial sector, with a particular focus on the credit union segment. The fund recommends a fundamental shift away from traditional compliance-focused supervision toward a modern risk-based oversight model, alongside targeted actions to improve loan loss provisioning practices and shore up capital buffers across the sector to mitigate systemic risk.
Two additional policy priorities identified in the report are strengthening the country’s anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorism financing (CTF) regulatory frameworks, and enhancing oversight of Antigua and Barbuda’s high-profile Citizenship by Investment Programme (CIP), a key source of foreign revenue for the island nation. The IMF also stresses that upgrading national data collection and management systems is an overlooked but critical reform, noting that robust, high-quality economic data is a prerequisite for crafting effective, evidence-based public policy that drives sustainable growth.
The release of the recommendations comes as Antigua and Barbuda maintains a steady trajectory of economic expansion. The IMF projects the country will record real gross domestic product growth of 3 percent in 2025, with growth largely fueled by ongoing construction activity, even as the key tourism sector faces softer demand than in previous post-pandemic recovery years.