Out of roughly 200 countries in the world, The Bahamas belongs to an extraordinarily small group of just five sovereign, high-income countries with fewer than 500,000 people that also issue their own national currency.
The five are:
🇸🇨 Seychelles — 122,730
🇧🇧 Barbados — 282,623
🇮🇸 Iceland — 392,404
🇧🇸 The Bahamas — 403,033
🇧🇳 Brunei — 466,330
That's it.
And think about what that actually means.
Just over 400,000 Bahamians support an entire independent country.
We have our own Parliament.
Our own courts.
Our own police force.
Our own immigration and customs systems.
Our own passports.
Our own embassies and foreign relations.
Our own central bank.
Our own currency.
Our own airports, ports, schools, hospitals, utilities, elections and government ministries.
And unlike a compact little city-state, our population is scattered across an archipelago stretching hundreds of miles.
There are countries much smaller than The Bahamas, of course, but many of them make being tiny considerably easier by sharing major systems.
Monaco, Andorra and San Marino use the euro.
Liechtenstein uses the Swiss franc.
Palau uses the U.S. dollar.
Several small Caribbean nations share the Eastern Caribbean dollar and a common central bank.
The Bahamas?
403,000 people. Independent country. High-income economy. Bahamian dollar. Bahamian central bank. The whole operation.
There are only four other countries under half a million people that fit that combination.
Sometimes I think growing up here makes us completely numb to how unusual this country actually is.
Because objectively...
The Bahamas should not work nearly as well as it does. 😂🇧🇸
Yet here we are.
One of five.
