CARIFORUM and UK EPA Study

subset of the larger countries within the CARIFORUM grouping. At the same time, there were also notable instances where no clear industry leader could be discerned on the basis of countries’ comparative advantage within a given sector. This was the case for Travel services, in which a leading competitive exporter could not be readily identified, due to the low and imperceptible differences in the RRCA indices observed, suggesting a high degree of saturation in the export of that service across CARIFORUM, empirically establishing the high dependence of the Region on travel services as a source of export earnings. There were also instances where only a single country either dominated or was the sole participant in a given export market, such as in the case of exports of Manufacturing services to the UK by the DR or the export of Maintenance and Repair services as well as Construction services by Barbados. There were also a few instances where only two countries returned non-zero RRCA indices within specific export services sectors. This included exports of “Personal, Cultural, and Recreational Services”, which were dominated by Jamaica, returning RRCA indices above 3.5, followed by the DR, which showed an overall lack of competitiveness vis-à-vis Jamaica, during the period 2015-2018 when it exported those services. Notwithstanding, almost all countries showed some evidence of comparative/competitive advantage, in at least one sector, though the strength of some of those advantages in many instances were rather weak. The general assessment of the region’s services export performance on the RRCA indicators, therefore, serves to confirm the known concentration by the region in the export of a few main services to the UK market, which are largely dominated by only a handful of countries.

v. Sectoral RRCA analysis

At the sectoral level, the evidence of dominance by either individual or pairs of countries in the Regional RCA rankings suggests that, perhaps, a few of the exportable services sectors within CARIFORUM countries involve activities in which individual countries either have an historical or natural competitive edge due to the longstanding trading relationship that has existed with the

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