Cayman Islands Financial Services

It is obvious that post-Ivan recovery activity is cooling in the Cayman Islands, however, it is also obvious that negative outcomes are inevitable. Recently, Financial Secretary Hon. Kenneth Jefferson informed that Cayman’s imports in 2006 fell by $89.2 million or 9%, as compared to the 2005 figure.

At the time, Jefferson was tabling in the Legislative Assembly the Cayman Islands Overseas Trade Statistics 2006.

It should be noted that the United Nations and other international organisations use reports on Cayman’s trade statistics.

Jefferson said that the decrease in imports is “directly linked to the winding down of the country’s post-Ivan reconstruction”. According to him, total value of imports of construction materials fell by 43.8% and imports of other intermediate goods fell by 39.2%.

The total value of imports in 2006 was $906.1 million.

However, data compiled by the Economic and Statistics Office of the Portfolio of Finance reveals that imports for consumption increased by 24.6%, which, according to Jefferson, could be linked to the recovery of stay-over tourism during that year. Imports for food and beverages increased by 27.6%.

The United States again dominated as the market for Cayman’s imports with $656.6 million or 71.8% of total imports of goods brought into the Cayman Islands. The 2nd was the Netherlands with $73 million or 8%, and the 3rd was Japan with $6.3 million or 0.7%.

Jefferson said it is good that the percentage of unclassified imports declined significantly – from 20.1% in 2005 to 8.9% in 2006.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 7:40 am and is filed under Cayman News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.