Many members of the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM) remain highly vulnerable. Large-scale industrialization has not played a prominent role in their structural transformation. Services can be the key to a just economic transition and stronger resilience against external shocks if better managed. Efforts of structural transformation must consider the unique circumstances of these countries resulting from the small size of their economies, their remoteness, and climatic conditions.
A seamless functioning of transport, telecommunications, energy, and finance - all “services” sectors - is a pre-requisite to speedy and efficient recovery from shocks. To date, such progress has been hampered by pressing data gaps on trade in services, as highlighted by member States at the UNCTAD Multi-year Expert Meeting on Trade, Services and Development in July 2022. Reliable data are indispensable to better understand the region’s opportunities and challenges and for countries to be able to benefit from global value chains in services.
This project aims to strengthen the capacity and data infrastructure of selected CARICOM member States to improve their evidence-based policymaking for increased resilience and transformational change via global services. This will be achieved by regional and bilateral capacity support including statistical training workshops, advisory services and e-learning on collecting and compiling official trade in service statistics, including by adjusting to countries’ needs UNCTAD’s Trade-in-Services Information System (TiSSTAT) which can be used by statistical authorities to collect data from enterprises, edit and validate data, and compile final statistics. These efforts will be strengthened by policy support, including an analysis of the role of services trade in the countries, advisory services, and a sub-regional workshop on how to use data and analyse on trade in services for evidence-based policies. As a result, countries will achieve an enhanced capacity and data infrastructure to analyse services trade which enables evidence-based policies to increase resilience and transformation via services.