BARBADOS’ EXPORTS HAVE decreased at a time when several neighbours have registered growth.
And the Caribbean’s exports have also declined as the wider Latin America and the Caribbean region reports improvement in such trade.
That’s based on the latest edition of the Inter-American Development Bank’s annual report Trade Trend Estimates Of Latin America And The Caribbean.
The report said Barbados’ first quarter exports dropped by 16 per cent, while other Caribbean countries performed positively.
“Exports from the Caribbean fell 5.7 per cent in 2016. Data available for five countries of the subregion reveal a change in trend in the first months of 2017, although smaller than in Latin America,” the report stated.
“The year-on-year growth rate for the first quarter reached 12 per cent. Except Barbados, whose exports contracted 16 per cent, the rest of the countries registered expansions in foreign sales.
“At the high growth end, exports from Jamaica and Belize increased 32 per cent and 25 per cent, after falling 9.2 per cent and 24.9 per cent in 2016, respectively. At the lower end, in Suriname the increase was 13 per cent (-12.4 per cent in 2016) and in Haiti it was barely three per cent (-20.5 per cent in 2016).”
In terms of the wider region, the IDB report said after four consecutive years of contraction, Latin American and Caribbean exports returned to a path of growth. In the first quarter of 2017, the value of goods exports increased 17 per cent year-on-year, having contracted 2.9 per cent in 2016.
The recovery was driven primarily by a rebound in commodity prices, according to the IDB analysis.
“The trend reversal is great news for Latin America and the Caribbean. Yet, in the current context, one should not overestimate the drivers of this export expansion, which remain unstable and still restricted to a few regional economies,” said Paolo Giordano, principal economist of the Integration and Trade Sector and coordinator of the report.
The return to an export growth path marked the end of the longest trade recession in the region’s recent history, which lasted 24 months. (SC)
