Cari­com mem­ber states could save over US$1.3 bil­lion a year by re­duc­ing their heavy re­liance on US im­ports, ac­cord­ing to the Cari­com Pri­vate Sec­tor Or­gan­i­sa­tion (CP­SO).

This find­ing was pre­sent­ed on Tues­day dur­ing a hy­brid fo­rum host­ed in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the East­ern Caribbean Cen­tral Bank (EC­CB) at its head­quar­ters in St Kitts and Nevis.

The CP­SO study, which analysed over 1,200 prod­uct lines val­ued at US$9.1 bil­lion, re­veals that near­ly 70 per cent of fi­nal goods im­port­ed in­to Cari­com come from the Unit­ed States. That lev­el of de­pen­dence, ac­cord­ing to CP­SO CEO and tech­ni­cal di­rec­tor Dr Patrick An­toine, not on­ly lim­its the re­gion’s eco­nom­ic flex­i­bil­i­ty but al­so in­creas­es vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to trade pol­i­cy shifts and in­fla­tion­ary pres­sures.