CARIFORUM and UK EPA Study

UK, and/or the incidental development of certain industries within those jurisdictions, rather than in others. This potential fact may further be driving the lack of full participation in each sector by all CARIFORUM States, which has been observed, and may thus be contributing to the relative strength of some of the RRCA indices reported. Notwithstanding, the majority of sectors benefitted from the full, if not near complete, participation by all CARIFORUM States and clear industry leaders emerged in most areas, with often very strong levels of comparative advantage shown. In the case of the largest export sector – i.e., Travel services , Saint Lucia enjoyed the highest levels of both competitive and comparative advantage of all the CARIFORUM countries surveyed, despite returning maximum RRCA indices of 1.18, and was followed by The Bahamas with maximum indices of 1.15 (See Table 42 below) . These results indicate that the overall comparative advantage enjoyed by St. Lucia was very weak and that the overall competitive margins across all CARIFORUM States were rather slim, again confirming the over saturation of that market segment, which largely services the region’s burgeoning tourist market, with St. Lucia clearly in relatively higher demand as a regional destination for UK travellers than other regional competitors. The results also appear to suggest that there may be limited opportunities for growth in the exports of Travel services to the UK market across the board. However, consideration must be given to the likely further development of niche activities, which present additional growth opportunities in the eco-tourism, community-based tourism, cultural/heritage tourism, and, now more recently, “work from abroad” travel/tourism arrangements, which have cropped up in this sector due to the on-going COVID-19 pandemic. For Other Business services , which is a very diverse sub-category comprising a host of services, from R&D, Professional and Management Consulting, Architectural, and Engineering services to Technical, Scientific, Operating Leasing, Trade-related and Employment (e.g., search and placement) services, Suriname was the clear export leader vis-à-vis the UK market, producing positive RRCA indices of between 5.53 up to 12.65.

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