LEAST MONEY PRINTING COUNTRIES

The Countries Printing the Least Money

Dominica’s money supply grew 1.07% a year, averaged over the last decade: a 10-year CAGR (compound annual growth rate), as of 2026-02. That’s the slowest of the 159 economies in our dataset with a valid growth figure. At that rate, it takes 65.28 years to double. Kuwait’s decade-average is 1.80%/yr (2026-04) and Japan’s is 2.61%/yr (2026-02), the next-slowest two. Every row below carries its own observation date, and they span 31 months.

The slowest-growing money supplies, ranked

This growth rate ranking inverts the one most infographics publish. Growth ratios need no currency conversion, so all 159 economies compare directly — a money supply index sorted by rate, not size. Read it as monetary dilution running in reverse: the rows at the top are where purchasing-power decay is slowest. The 15 rows below cover every economy with a positive 10-year CAGR under 4%. Two more post a negative 10-year CAGR and get their own table, since a shrinking money supply never doubles.

‡ no USD-converted value on file — valid here, since a growth ranking needs no FX rate. ⚠ observation older than 24 months. § an aggregate of its member territories, not an independent economy. Columns 3-4 are the 10-year average; column 5 (YoY growth) is the last 12 months — read them separately. Congo runs on the CFA franc (below); Barbados pegs 2:1 to the US dollar.

Dominica is the case that makes the split matter: the slowest 10-year average in the set (1.07%/yr, 2026-02) sits next to a 10.3% year-over-year reading — faster than the United States’ own 6.0% year-over-year growth (2025-12). A single fast year doesn’t erase nine slow ones, and the two columns answer different questions. Every figure above is also nominal, not inflation-adjusted — the real vs nominal money growth gap is a separate calculation this table doesn’t make.

Two economies show an outright decline over ten years, not merely slow growth. Doubling time has no meaning at a negative rate, so neither appears above.

Both post a positive latest year-over-year reading anyway — a single recent month can rise while the ten-year trend still falls. San Marino uses the euro but isn’t a euro-area member. Unlike the 20 states inside the euro area, it keeps its own IMF series, which is why it can appear here as an independent row at all.

Two economies dropped out of this article when we fixed how the window is measured, and both belong on the record. Equatorial Guinea sat in the table above at −3.86%/yr, and it was never shrinking: the ten-year window crossed a 2018-05 redenomination that cut the series from 81.77 trillion to 537 billion CFA francs overnight. Measured from the break forward, over 67 months, it grows 12.5%/yr (2023-12) — nowhere near the slow end. Grenada broke the same way at 2025-01 and now has only 13 months of comparable data, too short to annualise, so we publish no growth rate for it rather than a figure we would have to caveat away.

What a slow growth rate does and doesn’t mean

Answering which country prints the least money is not the same as answering which one is best-run. “I see the data and understand the chart, but I don’t understand how to interpret the data,” a reader wrote in 2019 about a broad-money-to-GDP chart on r/dataisbeautiful — the same gap this ranking risks leaving open. A low 10-year CAGR is not a discipline score. We rank on the 10-year average, and we don’t read it as a scorecard: at least four mechanisms produce that number, and mixing them up misreads the whole table.

Most of the rows above run on a currency board, a peg or a currency basket. Dominica, Montserrat, Anguilla, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and St. Kitts and Nevis share the East Caribbean dollar, pegged to the US dollar since 1976 under currency-board rules from the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank. New EC dollars need reserve backing. That caps the 10-year average, and it leaves no discretion beyond the cap: these territories cannot expand their money supply on their own, so the slow rate is structure, not restraint. Six of the currency union’s eight members rank in this article. Antigua and Barbuda misses the 4% cut by 0.10 points (4.10%/yr, 17.27y, 2026-02), landing 0.17 above St. Vincent at the bottom of the table; Grenada, on the same peg and almost certainly the same slow end, has no publishable rate at all since its 2025-01 series break.

The rest of the slow end reaches the same place by other routes. Brunei’s dollar has been pegged 1-to-1 with Singapore’s since 1967. Kuwait’s dinar pegs to an undisclosed weighted currency basket, the mechanism behind its 1.80%/yr rate. Denmark’s krone tracks the euro inside ERM II. The Republic of the Congo uses the CFA franc, pegged to the euro and backstopped by the French Treasury across six Central African states, so its 1.72%/yr decade-average (2023-12) isn’t a policy choice made in Brazzaville. San Marino runs no independent monetary policy at all — it sits inside the euro area’s borders and uses the euro on its own.

Small financial systems compound the effect: Dominica’s entire broad money stock is $596.6 million (2026-02), smaller than one large US regional bank’s balance sheet, which caps how much credit can organically grow, peg or no peg.

Japan is the one large, freely floating economy here, and it is here for the opposite reason: the Bank of Japan spent three decades fighting deflation rather than exercising restraint. It exited negative rates only in 2024. A 26.87-year doubling time reads as stagnation risk against that history, not virtue. The same number that looks disciplined on a Caribbean peg looks like a policy failure on a floating yen.

None of the 17 above is dollarized, and dollarization cuts against the virtue reading rather than supporting it. The three dollarized economies with a current series in our data all grew faster than every row in this article: Ecuador 7.22%/yr over the decade (2026-04), El Salvador 7.24% (2026-06), Timor-Leste 9.98% (2025-06). Handing your currency to the Federal Reserve does not slow your money supply down — the deposits inside your banking system keep growing. That is the fifth mechanism, and it slows nothing down.

None of this makes a low 10-year average a signal to hold that currency. A peg caps supply growth by design; it says nothing about that currency’s return or its liquidity, or about how easily you convert it back to dollars. Least printing and best currency to hold are different questions.

The fast end of the same table lives on Money Supply Growth Rate by Country, Ranked. Zimbabwe tops it at 338.2%/yr (2026-04), the fastest growing money supply in our dataset, doubling every 0.47 years. That rate covers the 47 months since a 2022-05 redenomination, not a decade, so it is not comparable to anything on this page. Measured the way every row here is measured, over a full ten years, the fastest is South Sudan at 69.6%/yr (2026-06), a 1.31-year doubling time, 49.7 times faster than Dominica’s. Doubling time here comes from the exact compounding formula, applied to each economy’s own base year, not the rule of 72. At Dominica’s 1.07%, that mental-math rule gives 67.45 years against the exact 65.28 — a 2.17-year overshoot, the largest absolute error anywhere in this table. Both rankings draw on the same IMF MFS_MA/BM_MAI series and the same CAGR formula; see how we calculate it.

FAQ