Sailing Rough Seas: Accelerating Growth and Fostering Resilience to Climate Change in Cabo Verde

Cabo Verde is a young, small, and vibrant island nation with an open economy. Rising above its daunting geographical challenges and limited endowments, the country is a story of economic success. Reforms to the rule of law and the market have prompted significant economic and social progress since the country’s independence from Portugal in 1975, leading to democratic and macro-economic stability. Its robust, albeit highly volatile, economic growth has been driven by tourism, remittances, and foreign direct investment, enabled by structural reforms and social and political stability. Despite remarkable social and economic progress, Cabo Verde’s development model has been showing signs of fatigue since the 2008 global financial crisis. To guide Cabo Verde in meeting these challenges, this Country Economic Memorandum (CEM) contains two modules: (1) empowering complementary engines of growth; and (2) fostering the resilience of growth to disaster and climate-related shocks. The CEM benchmarks Cabo Verde’s performance against other Small Island Developing States (SIDS), structural peers (Samoa, São Tomé and Principe, and Vanuatu), and aspirational peers (Mauritius, Seychelles, St. Kitts and Nevis, and St. Lucia). Structural peers are countries that share similar economic characteristics and endowments, while aspirational peers are countries that have been able to grow faster and more sustainably than Cabo Verde, despite sharing similar structural conditions (Annex 1).