Jamaica

Jamaica: Comparatively High Democracy Scores With a Modest Defense Budget

Jamaica's GDP was $22.01 billion in 2024, with GDP per capita of $7,754 and a population of 2,839,175, per World Bank WDI data. V-Dem's 2025 wave scores the country at 0.805 for electoral democracy, 0.679 for liberal democracy, and 0.847 for state capacity — all toward the upper end of V-Dem's 0-1 scale.

SIPRI's 2025 Milex data put military expenditure at $286.6 million, or 1.368 percent of GDP under SIPRI's own GDP series; that ratio should not be recomputed against the World Bank GDP figure cited above. The Correlates of War National Material Capabilities dataset recorded 6,000 active-duty personnel in 2022 and a CINC score of 0.00021071896 for the same year.

On fiscal and external position, the IMF's World Economic Outlook projects government debt at 65.8 percent of GDP for 2026, while IMF International Financial Statistics data recorded reserves of $6.30 billion as of 2025. Both figures come from the same 2025-2026 IMF reporting window used elsewhere in this bundle.

The Correlates of War CINC score, a fractional share of global material capability derived from population, military personnel, and industrial inputs across the full international system, should be read alongside the 6,000-person active-duty figure above rather than as a standalone strength measure.

Energy

Our World in Data figures put primary energy consumption at 0.1261 exajoules in 2023 and electricity generation at 4.92 terawatt-hours in 2024. Both oil and gas production are recorded at 0.0 terawatt-hours, dated 2016.

Data Gaps

The oil and gas production entries show no domestic output as of the 2016 reading in this bundle, but the decade-old dateline means they cannot speak to the current state of play. The 2026 government debt figure is an IMF projection rather than a realized outturn, and debt at that level alongside the reserves figure above warrants monitoring, though no debt-service or reserve-adequacy ratio is present in this bundle to quantify that further. No conflict-event or alliance data are present here.

Sources: World Bank WDI, IMF WEO, IMF IFS, SIPRI Milex, Correlates of War NMC, V-Dem v15, Our World in Data (Energy).