01Key Takeaways
- Montserrat exported $5.77 million worth of goods in 2023, down 13.24% from $6.65 million in 2022.
- Salt, stone, cement and related mineral products made up 94.30% of exports ($5.44 million), almost entirely volcanic aggregate.
- Every dollar of Montserrat's exports in 2023 was recorded under a generic "Areas, nes" trade partner category, with no single country identified as a destination.
- Exports peaked at $8.43 million in 2021 before falling for two straight years to their 2023 level.
025-Year Trend
| Year | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Value | $5.6M | $5.7M | $8.4M | $6.6M | $5.8M |
03Top Export Markets (2023)
| Rank | Partner | Value | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Areas, nes | $5.8M | 100.0% |
04Top Export Categories (2023)
| Rank | Category | Value | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Salt; Sulphur; Earths and Stone; Plastering Materials, Lime and Cement | $5.4M | 94.3% |
| 2 | Vehicles other than Railway or Tramway Rolling-Stock, and parts and accessories thereof | $84.0K | 1.5% |
| 3 | Electrical Machinery and Equipment and parts thereof; Sound Recorders and Reproducers, Television Image and Sound Recorders and Reproducers, and Parts and Accessories of such Articles | $60.1K | 1.0% |
| 4 | Nuclear Reactors, Boilers, Machinery and Mechanical Appliances; Parts thereof | $57.6K | 1.0% |
| 5 | Commodities not specified according to kind | $54.0K | 0.9% |
| 6 | Articles of Iron or Steel | $21.4K | 0.4% |
| 7 | Optical, Photographic, Cinematographic, Measuring, Checking, Precision, Medical or Surgical Instruments and Apparatus; Parts and Accessories thereof | $19.9K | 0.3% |
| 8 | Furniture; Bedding, Mattresses, Mattress Supports, Cushions and similar Stuffed Furnishings; Lamps and Lighting Fittings, not elsewhere specified or included; Illuminated Signs, Illuminated Name-plates and the like; Prefabricated Buildings | $6.9K | 0.1% |
| 9 | Live Animals | $5.0K | 0.1% |
| 10 | Tools, Implements, Cutlery, Spoons and Forks, of Base Metal; Parts thereof of Base Metal | $2.7K | 0.0% |
05Trade Partner Map
06Analysis
Volcanic Rock Built an Export Industry Almost by Accident
Montserrat exported $5.77 million worth of goods in 2023, down 13.24% from $6.65 million in 2022. Salt, sulphur, earths, stone, and lime and cement materials led every category by an overwhelming margin at 94.30% of the total, worth $5.44 million. Companies on the island have built a business extracting and exporting aggregate from the volcanic ash left behind by the Soufrière Hills eruptions, turning decades of volcanic disruption into one of the few industries the island still has left. The Soufrière Hills volcano became active again in 1995. It buried much of the island's southern half, including the former capital, Plymouth, under ash and pyroclastic flows. That eruption displaced most of Montserrat's population and reshaped its economy for good, closing off farmland and settlements that once anchored a very different export mix. Rebuilding an export business around the very material that forced people off their land is an unusual kind of resilience, even if it now accounts for nearly everything the island ships abroad.
Vehicles were a distant second at 1.46% ($84,027), and electrical machinery added 1.04% ($60,123). Machinery contributed 1.00% ($57,641), and a catch-all "commodities not specified" line added 0.94% ($53,984). Iron and steel articles supplied 0.37% ($21,432), and optical and measuring instruments contributed 0.35% ($19,944). Furniture added 0.12% ($6,865), live animals contributed 0.09% ($5,000), and tools closed out the top ten at 0.05% ($2,695). None of these smaller categories moves the total in any meaningful way. Montserrat's export economy is, in practical terms, a single volcanic materials business with a scattering of incidental shipments layered on top.
No Single Country Shows Up as a Buyer
Every dollar of Montserrat's exports in 2023 was recorded under a category labeled "Areas, nes," short for "not elsewhere specified," with a 100% share of the total. That is not a data error specific to this island. UN Comtrade, the database behind these figures, uses the "Areas NES" designation for low-value trade, for shipments where the destination country was unknown to the reporting government, or for cases where partner details are withheld to protect confidential business information. Montserrat's export volumes are small enough, and its trade statistics thin enough, that its entire export book falls into that catch-all rather than being broken down by destination.
That gap makes it impossible to say with any confidence which countries actually buy Montserrat's volcanic aggregate or its small stream of vehicles and machinery re-exports. The aggregate almost certainly moves to nearby Caribbean islands that need imported construction material. Montserrat's own population, still only a few thousand people since the eruption, is nowhere near large enough to absorb anywhere near this volume domestically. But the underlying trade data simply does not identify those buyers by name. No amount of analysis can responsibly fill in a blank that the official statistics themselves leave open, and guessing at specific destinations would mean inventing a level of certainty the numbers do not actually support.
Exports Peaked in 2021 and Have Fallen for Two Years Straight
Export values climbed steadily through the pandemic before pulling back. The total stood at $5.59 million in 2019, rose slightly to $5.71 million in 2020, then jumped to $8.43 million in 2021, the high point of the five-year window. It fell to $6.65 million in 2022 and again to $5.77 million in 2023, down 13.24% from the year before. Two consecutive years of decline after a single standout year is not unusual for an export base this narrow and this small in absolute terms.
That two-year decline traces back to the same volcanic aggregate business that dominates the export list. Almost nothing else in Montserrat's economy is large enough to move the total meaningfully in either direction, up or down. A small number of extraction and shipping operations drive nearly all of Montserrat's export revenue. Any slowdown in regional construction demand would show up almost immediately in the island's total. So would any disruption to a single quarry operation, or any shift in shipping costs along the routes that carry the aggregate away. An economy this concentrated in one product has very little room to diversify its way out of a bad year. Not identifying its own buyers only compounds that fragility, since there is no way to track demand at the destination end before a slowdown already shows up in the export figures themselves.