CARIFORUM and UK EPA Study

highly concentrated in only a few categories, thus increasing its vulnerability to exogenous shocks and other external developments.

Furthermore, across the top five traded sectors, the countries driving the bilateral trade in services with the UK remained, unsurprisingly, The Bahamas, Barbados, the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, with Barbados being the most active trading partner for the UK across the five major bilateral services activities traded. They were followed by Jamaica, by virtue of its dominance of the transport and travel services sectors, and then The Bahamas. This again suggests a high degree of concentration of not only export activities but also of export centres throughout the region, where the majority of the trade with the UK rests in the hands of but a few major economies within CARIFORUM. The revealed comparative advantage (RCA) index is computed for each CARIFORUM State using a modified version of the RCA that is applicable to regional trade, in order to obtain a measure of relative competitiveness for each country. This measure was considered both more appropriate to the circumstances of the UK’s and CARIFORUM’s bilateral trade relationship, given that it allowed for a more direct assessment of the relative strengths of each exporting State on the basis of the region’s actual and total trade with the UK, and also allowed for a more accurate interpretation of the results vis-à-vis what the RCA ratios/indices mean in practical terms. The regional RCA computation also allows for greater control over the usual unaccounted for trade frictions that accompany international trade and which are implicitly present in the standard RCA calculations that rely on the region’s trade with the world instead of trade with its actual trading iii. Assessment of the Competitiveness of CARIFORUM States vis-a-vis the UK

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