Bermuda is one of the richest places in the world by average income (gross domestic product per capita is $138,935), yet that wealth is unevenly distributed because the underlying structure concentrates gains at the top while broadly distributing costs.

This, however, is not a contradiction within or of the system, but rather reflects the essential structure of how the economic system is built: it is structured to produce wealth and inequality at the same time.

At the centre is a dual economy. Bermuda’s wealth is driven largely by high-end international business (insurance, reinsurance, finance) that offers a relatively small number of highly paid, globally competitive roles. These sectors do not raise all incomes evenly. Instead, they create a narrow band of workers who earn very high salaries.

Alongside this industry of extreme wealth accumulation, comparable to the highest global earners, sits a local economy of services, retail, hospitality, tourism, and public employment, where wages are far lower and tied to domestic conditions.

For example, the median salary in international business in 2026 is $169,000, while the median salary in hospitality and support services is $42,704. This means international business workers earn roughly four times more than hospitality workers.

Thus, two full-time workers in different sectors can differ by over $120,000 per year at the median, not because of hours worked, but because of their position within the structure of the economy.

This divide is then magnified by Bermuda’s high import-dependent cost structure. As an island that sources more than 90 per cent of its goods and has extremely limited land, prices for food, housing, and basic goods are structurally high. Food costs are not only the result of retail pricing, but of layered import duties, shipping dependencies, fuel costs, and a small domestic market that limits economies of scale.

As a result, basic nutrition and food becomes a disproportionately large share of income for lower and middle-income households. This means inequality is experienced not only in terms of income, but in the nutritional quality, variety, and stability of everyday consumption itself.

Housing is the system’s most powerful amplifier of wealth and inequality. Scarce land and high demand, driven in part by top earners and expatriate demand, turn property into both a necessity and a primary vehicle for wealth accumulation.

This has resulted in the average cost of a home being approximately $1 million, the average cost of rent being around $3,000 per month, more than 400 families on waiting lists for housing accommodation, and more than 1,300 persons identified as homeless, within a population of 60,000, on a 21-square-mile island.

The financialisation of housing as a primary asset for wealth building and accumulation simply means that inequality is baked into the system. It is not produced by individual laziness or by people working harder than others, but by the structure of the economic system itself.

To be clear, those who own property benefit from rising values and stability, while those who rent face persistent financial strain and limited ability to build wealth. This creates a self-reinforcing divide between asset holders and non-asset holders, embedding inequality over time.

Healthcare further reinforces inequality. While access is formally widespread, affordability is not. In the global capital of reinsurance, an estimated 12 per cent of residents are uninsured, and a further 23 per cent are underinsured, meaning that up to 35 per cent of our population faces financial constraints in accessing adequate healthcare services.

In practice, insurance coverage does not guarantee timely or comprehensive access to care, as high premiums, copayments, deductibles, and out-of-pocket expenses create barriers even for those nominally covered.

This produces a system where health outcomes are increasingly shaped by income, with lower-income households more likely to delay treatment, forgo preventive care, or experience untreated chronic conditions over time.

These pressures are reflected in Bermuda’s health profile: around 50 per cent of residents live with at least one chronic condition, over one-third have hypertension or high cholesterol, and diabetes affects more than 13 per cent of the population.

Cardiovascular disease also accounts for roughly 35 per cent of deaths, highlighting a high-income society with a disproportionately high burden of preventable, long-term illness shaped by access and affordability.

Overlaying these dynamics is a relatively limited redistributive framework. Without a broad-based income tax, corporate tax, wealth tax, capital gains tax, or inheritance tax, and with greater reliance on indirect taxes, including payroll tax and customs duties, Bermuda has fewer tools than typical high-income countries to rebalance outcomes.

At the same time, the need to remain attractive (as a low-tax jurisdiction) to international business, the current main driver of structural inequality, seems to place practical limits on how far redistribution can go. The result is a system where market-generated inequality is only partially offset.

While the introduction of the corporate income tax has created a windfall revenue stream for the Government, this was not primarily a domestic redistributive decision, but a response to global tax coordination rules (under the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s BEPS Pillar Two initiative).

In theory, the CIT could increase public revenue to fund public housing, universal healthcare, and offer greater cost-of-living relief, and thereby reduce inequality if redistributed effectively. However, it is important to note that CIT does not alter the core inequality structure: wage gaps (international business versus hospitality) remain unchanged; housing market dynamics remain unchanged, as investing in housing as an asset is still incentivised as wealth building; and the cost of living remains high, due to continued import dependence.

CIT changes how Bermuda interacts with the global tax system, but not how income is generated, how wealth accumulates, or how costs are distributed in Bermuda.

These contemporary structures sit on even deeper historical foundations. Inequality in Bermuda has a long history tied to its origins as a company colony, established to extract profits from the island and its people for the Crown and its shareholders.

Legacies of colonialism, slavery, segregation, racial exclusion, and economic stratification have shaped access to land, education, employment, and opportunity across multiple generations. Slavery in Bermuda persisted until emancipation, and Black Bermudians only received full universal suffrage and democratic participation during my grandparents’ generation.

Today’s disparities in wealth and income are therefore not only the result of current economic arrangements, but also the continuation of historically unequal starting points. While Bermuda has largely dismantled the legal architecture of colonial inequality, it has not yet fundamentally reshaped the economic and asset structures that those inequalities created.

The struggle for emancipation and universal suffrage has been achieved. But the question of who owns what assets, who earns what, and how the benefits of the whole economy are distributed fairly over time remains unresolved.

Taken together, these forces form a set of reinforcing loops: high global incomes push up local prices, especially housing; high costs erode the purchasing power of lower and middle incomes; limited redistribution constrains course correction; and restricted access to assets prevents wealth accumulation for much of the population. Inequality persists not because of a single failure within the system, but because each part of the system reinforces the others.

The big picture is that Bermuda’s disparity is the predictable result of a globally integrated, high-income enclave operating within the tight physical and economic constraints of a small island, layered on top of severe historical inequality, and only moderated by insufficient redistribution.

Thus, Bermuda is not both rich and unequal by accident, it is rich in a way that structurally produces inequality. In Bermuda, wealth does not simply cause inequality; it is the structure of the system itself that produces both simultaneously.

• Aaron Crichlow is the founder and managing director of Bermuda Is Love (Registered Charity 1051), leading efforts to ensure everyone’s basic needs are met through justice and collective care. He is also a lawyer and philosopher, with a focus on human rights, dignity and human flourishing