Digital Services Exports Grew Nearly Fivefold. The Region Still Has 2% of the World Market.
A new WTO, IDB, and World Bank report notes that while our region is growing fast, it still captures very little of the global digital services market. For Trinidad and Tobago businesses, competing at this level means ensuring your website is ready.
Trinidad and Tobago businesses already export services. Most don’t count it.
A Trinidad and Tobago consultancy that invoices a client in Miami is an exporter. So is a design studio on retainer to a firm in Bridgetown, and a software house maintaining a system for a company in Georgetown. Few of them describe the work that way. It gets filed as a client who happens to be abroad. Webgold’s reading is that a Trinidad and Tobago business can close part of the region’s digital services export gap itself, without waiting for policy, by making sure a buyer abroad can find it, understand what it sells, trust it, and pay it.
The region still has 2% of world digital services exports
That habit deserves a second look this week. On 8 September the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and the World Bank released Digital Trade in Latin America and the Caribbean: Connecting Markets, Powering Growth. It found that the region’s exports of digitally delivered services, meaning services delivered remotely over computer networks, grew nearly fivefold between 2005 and 2024, from US$18.5 billion to US$87.7 billion (WTO, IDB, and World Bank, 2026). “ Latin America and the Caribbean still accounted for just 2% of world exports of those services in 2024, against 2.9% of world services trade and 6.4% of goods trade.
The report’s recommendations are addressed to governments. Read by a business rather than a ministry, its diagnosis also describes those four things a single business controls, and that part of the 2% does not have to wait for policy.
The growth is real, and Latin America’s largest economies lead it
Brazil alone exported US$29.4 billion of digitally delivered services in 2024, and the report names Brazil, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Argentina as the region’s leaders.
Size is not what separates the leaders. Digitally delivered services earn 8% of gross domestic product (GDP) in Dominica and 6% in Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda, and Belize, while in most of the region’s economies they account for 1% or less (WTO, IDB, and World Bank, 2026). Some of the smallest economies in the Caribbean already earn more of their output this way than most of Latin America.
Trinidad and Tobago’s own figures are smaller and older. Speaking during Trinidad & Tobago Coalition of Services Industries’ National Services Week, Abigail Bynoe, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Trade, Investment and Tourism, put the estimated value of Trinidad and Tobago’s digitally deliverable services exports at US$162 million in 2020 and US$304 million in 2022 (TTT News, 7 September 2026). “ She put total services exports at about US$1.27 billion, in an economy where services made up 59.2% of GDP in 2024. That is a government estimate of services that can be delivered remotely, a different measure from the report’s, so the two should not be compared directly. What it shows is direction: digital services exports from Trinidad and Tobago nearly doubled in two years, from a small base.
In Trinidad and Tobago, the constraint is capability, not cables
The report is clear that infrastructure is not Trinidad and Tobago’s main problem. It lists Trinidad and Tobago among the economies where broadband penetration exceeds 80%, and among those producing more graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics than some countries at the same level of development (WTO, IDB, and World Bank, 2026).
Where it points instead is at the private sector. It describes an IDB programme that “aims to strengthen Trinidad and Tobago’s digital innovation ecosystem by addressing low digital capabilities in the private sector.” “ Across the region, it finds that firms “still have only limited knowledge of digital channels and the conditions and skills needed to market and sell to international customers.”
Both sentences are about businesses, not governments. We’d argue that a Trinidad and Tobago company can act on them this quarter, without a new trade agreement or a change in regulation.
To sell services abroad from Trinidad, the website is the first office a buyer visits
The buyers are mostly to the north and next door. The United States takes 34.4% of the region’s exports of digitally deliverable services. Within the Caribbean Community, 38% of members’ intra-regional digital services trade stays inside the bloc. And Trinidad and Tobago is the one Caribbean economy in the report whose e-commerce sites draw most of their foreign visitors from elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean rather than from the United States (WTO, IDB, and World Bank, 2026).
None of those buyers will walk past your office. A procurement lead in Miami or Kingston shortlists suppliers from search results, and now from artificial intelligence (AI) answers too, then reads the website before anyone picks up the phone. For a services exporter, the case we’re making here at Webgold is that the website does the job a trade mission used to do: it is where a buyer who will never visit decides whether you are worth a call.
There is a local advantage in this. The knowledge of the Caribbean that overseas firms charge Trinidad and Tobago businesses to acquire is the same knowledge a local company can sell outward, to buyers who need a supplier that already knows the region. “
Three things a buyer abroad checks before they call
These are the three checks Webgold would run first for any Trinidad and Tobago company that wants more of its work to come from abroad.
- Can human buyers and AI tools clearly understand your business and what you sell? Name your services using terms foreign buyers actually search for, not internal or local jargon. Name the people who do the work, their roles, and where you operate. If your site lacks specific names, services, and locations, search engines and AI tools won’t have enough data to recommend you to potential buyers.
- Can they see proof they can check? A buyer who will never visit needs named clients, outcomes with numbers, and dates, wherever clients have given permission. An unnamed claim gives a buyer abroad nothing to verify. Similarly, can AI tools quote these items when the buyer searches?
- Can they pay you without having to ask how? The report found that 74% of adults in Latin America and the Caribbean have a transaction account but only 20% make online payments to businesses, and that cross-border payments “remain slow and costly” (WTO, IDB, and World Bank, 2026). State your currency, terms, and accepted methods on the site, so a buyer’s first question is about the work.
Our reading of the 2%
The region’s 2% share will be argued over by ministries and trade negotiators, and it should be. Where we land is narrower and more immediate: for a Trinidad and Tobago service provider, the part of the gap that exists because of a website’s content and functionality can be rectified now. Growing digital services exports from Trinidad and Tobago starts with knowing what a buyer abroad sees today, before any money goes into an export push. Strategy before execution. Always.
