CARIFORUM and UK EPA Study

On the other hand, the aforementioned “big five” global services economies within the region played the leading role in its growing exports to the UK, propelled mainly by the Travel services sector, which accounted for more than 80% of the region’s total exports, followed by Other Business services and Transport services. Positive growth trends also emerged in the region’s exports of Insurance and Pension services as well as Personal, Cultural and Recreational services to the UK, suggesting opportunities for further growth and expansion of exports, particularly given the UK’s global imports within these two sub-sectors. The assessment of the region’s services export performance based on the RRCA indicators confirmed the region’s high concentration in the export of a few main services to the UK market, which are largely dominated by only a handful of countries. A cross-country RRCA analysis also showed that there was active participation by CARIFORUM States across a majority of the sectors assessed, with clear industry leaders emerging in most of areas, and in many instances States displayed very strong levels of comparative advantage in these sectors. In the case of the region’s largest export sector – i.e., Travel services , Saint Lucia enjoyed the highest level of comparative advantage, but its corresponding competitive margins were fairly weak in comparison to other CARIFORUM States, suggesting that there was significant saturation within that market segment and thus limited the opportunities for further growth in the region’s exports of Travel services to the UK market. Notwithstanding any niche opportunities that may be available to further promote growth in the sector. For Other Business services Suriname was the clear export leader, vis-à-vis the UK market, though the apparent contestability of the sector showed its potential dynamism, suggesting that significant opportunities remain to be exploited there. In relation to Transport services , Trinidad and Tobago enjoyed the greatest comparative advantage within this category of exports to the UK, likely due to that country’s dominance as a regional air carrier, with Caribbean Airlines being the main regionally owned trans-Atlantic link between CARIFORUM and the United Kingdom.

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