Eastern Caribbean Market Research: OECS 6-Island Coverage

The Eastern Caribbean encompasses six sovereign OECS member states with a combined population of approximately 625,000 and a shared currency, the Eastern Caribbean dollar. Tourism-dependent, CBI-funded, and increasingly climate-resilient, these markets offer consistent consumer research opportunities despite small individual populations. HRG maintains active field teams across all six OECS sovereign states.

Regional Economic Overview

The six sovereign OECS states share structural characteristics that make them coherent as a research region: all are small island developing states with populations ranging from approximately 52,000 in St. Kitts and Nevis to around 185,000 in Saint Lucia, all are heavily reliant on tourism for GDP and foreign exchange, and all operate under the Eastern Caribbean dollar managed by the ECCB. Per the World Bank's 2024 OECS overview, these countries face persistent structural challenges including high public debt, limited economic diversification, and exposure to climate-related shocks that can erase an entire year's economic output.

Growth across the subregion was broadly positive in 2024 with Dominica leading at an estimated 4.6%, followed by St. Vincent and the Grenadines at 4.7% (ECLAC forecast), Grenada at 3.7%, and Saint Lucia at 3.7%. Saint Kitts and Nevis grew at an estimated 3.7% as well, supported by CBI revenues and financial services. All six economies had returned to or exceeded pre-pandemic tourism volumes by 2024, with the shift toward luxury and experiential travel benefiting higher-income island markets. Dominica is pursuing a distinct development path through geothermal energy, a new international airport, and its reputation as an eco-tourism destination, supported by its Citizenship by Investment programme which funds critical infrastructure.

Grenada's fiscal performance in 2024 was exceptional: a surplus of 4.7% of GDP, public debt falling to 73.3% of GDP, and poverty declining to an estimated 12.6% in 2025, below pre-pandemic levels (World Bank, 2024). This reflects strong CBI inflows and a tourism recovery that absorbed Hurricane Beryl's 10% accommodation damage with resilience. Saint Lucia's tourism arrivals have exceeded pre-pandemic levels, and digital nomad visa programs in Antigua and Barbuda are extending average stays and boosting local spending. These dynamics create differentiated consumer market opportunities across what appear to be homogeneous island economies.

Country Comparison

Shared Market Characteristics

The OECS economic union, formalised under the Revised Treaty of Basseterre, enables free movement of goods, services, capital, and people across member states. This creates a functionally integrated consumer market despite political separation, with products, brands, and retail chains operating across multiple islands from common distribution hubs, typically St. Lucia or Antigua depending on the supply chain. The shared Eastern Caribbean dollar eliminates foreign exchange complexity and allows consumer prices to be directly compared across all six markets.

Tourism dominance creates a dual consumer market in all six states: resident consumers with different income levels, brand preferences, and shopping behaviours than the tourist population, which in several markets exceeds the resident population on any given day. Research designs must account for this bifurcation, particularly in retail audit and HRI channel studies. The same supermarket or restaurant may serve fundamentally different customer profiles depending on its location relative to resort zones.

CBI programmes in four of the six states (Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts, and Antigua) have introduced a third consumer category: resident investors who are neither traditional local consumers nor short-stay tourists. These individuals typically have high disposable income and premium consumption patterns and are concentrated in specific residential developments. Mapping their product and service preferences requires specialised sampling frames that HRG has developed through regional project experience.

Key Industries and Research Demand Drivers

Tourism dominates all six OECS economies and creates the highest single driver of research demand. Companies supplying goods and services to the tourism and hospitality sector require ongoing intelligence on hotel procurement practices, F&B menu trends, visitor spending patterns, and the shifting balance between mass market and luxury tourism demand. HRG has conducted HRI channel studies across Saint Lucia, Antigua, and Grenada for food and beverage brands seeking to understand buyer intent in the hotel and restaurant procurement chain.

Financial services is the second most active research sector in the Eastern Caribbean. Regional banks including CIBC First Caribbean, Republic Bank, Scotiabank, and a network of local credit unions compete for consumer current accounts, mortgages, and personal loans. CBI-funded development in Dominica, Grenada, and Saint Kitts has generated demand for wealth management, property finance, and tax advisory services from a new category of investor residents who hold citizenship as a financial planning instrument. Insurance penetration is relatively low across most OECS markets and is a research priority for insurers seeking to quantify the addressable market for property, health, and life products.

Agricultural and food research has gained commercial importance following Hurricane Beryl's July 2024 impact on Grenada and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. The storm's destruction of agricultural crops, particularly bananas and plantains, has accelerated interest in crop diversification, climate-resilient farming, and regional food supply chain research. Grenada's spice exports, particularly nutmeg and mace, are the subject of ongoing international buyer research as global culinary and beverage trends drive renewed interest in authentically sourced Caribbean ingredients. St. Vincent and the Grenadines' Blue Economy strategy, which encompasses sustainable ocean use, aquaculture, and marine tourism, is attracting development finance that requires market assessment and feasibility research.

Research Methodology in the OECS

Conducting representative consumer research in the Eastern Caribbean requires understanding the sampling constraints imposed by small island populations. Saint Kitts and Nevis has an estimated 52,000 residents; achieving a statistically significant sample of 300 to 400 completed interviews represents nearly 0.6% of the total population, a ratio rarely achieved in large-market research. This concentrated sampling is both a challenge, because the respondent pool is limited and repeat participation is likely over time, and an opportunity, because census-level coverage of specific consumer segments is achievable within reasonable fieldwork budgets.

Face-to-face household interviewing remains the gold standard methodology across all six markets. Online survey penetration, while growing, is insufficient for fully representative coverage in rural, lower-income, and older demographic segments. Telephone interviewing has limitations related to the proportion of the population with fixed-line connections, though mobile phone penetration is high enough to support mobile-assisted telephone interviewing (MATI) for urban samples. Street intercept interviewing is effective in commercial districts and market areas in larger islands and provides faster turnaround at lower cost than household sampling for specific target consumer profiles.

Multi-island OECS research conducted simultaneously generates efficiency gains that make single-question omnibus studies commercially viable even for smaller research budgets. HRG's OECS omnibus service runs quarterly across Saint Lucia, Antigua and Barbuda, and Grenada with supplementary waves in Dominica and Saint Vincent, allowing clients to add specific survey questions to an existing fieldwork programme at a fraction of the cost of commissioning standalone island studies.

Key Research Sectors in the Eastern Caribbean

Tourism and hospitality is the primary research sector across all six OECS markets. HRG conducts visitor exit surveys, in-resort consumer research, HRI operator interviews, and accommodation experience studies for tourism boards, hotel operators, and food and beverage suppliers. The dual consumer dynamic between residents and visitors requires careful sample delineation through quota controls and location-based screening questions.

FMCG and consumer goods is the second major sector. Given the shared distribution networks across OECS markets and the dominance of a small number of retail chains in each island, retail audit studies that track shelf presence, pricing, and distribution of consumer goods brands are particularly efficient when designed as multi-island programmes. Our retail audit methodology uses a consistent panel of retail outlets across all six markets to provide comparable data on brand distribution, facing counts, and price points.

Financial services, insurance, and CBI programme due diligence research constitute a growing third sector. As CBI revenues become more significant in Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts, and Antigua, financial institutions and government agencies require research on investor decision-making, programme perceptions, and competitive positioning against other CBI jurisdictions. HRG has developed specialist methodologies for this sector drawing on depth interviews with investment migration advisers and high-net-worth programme applicants across the OECS.

HRG Field Capabilities in the Eastern Caribbean

Hope Research Group has conducted primary research projects in all six OECS sovereign states. Our field network includes locally recruited interviewers in Saint Lucia, Antigua and Barbuda, and Grenada, with project-based field coordinator deployments to Dominica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. All field coordinators are bilingual in English and Eastern Caribbean Creole, enabling effective research in rural and lower-income communities where standard English survey instruments yield lower response quality.

Our OECS research portfolio spans consumer surveys, retail audit studies, brand tracking research, focus groups, and in-depth interviews across tourism, FMCG, financial services, and public health sectors. We regularly conduct multi-island omnibus studies that spread fixed fieldwork costs across multiple client questions, making smaller research investments accessible for single-island consumer insight needs. For organisations requiring a regional strategic overview, our Eastern Caribbean Market Intelligence package combines qualitative and quantitative research across all six markets into a single integrated deliverable with consistent methodology and comparable data across islands.

OECS tourism recovery has been strong and broad-based since 2022, with all six sovereign states reporting arrivals at or above pre-pandemic levels by 2024 (World Bank, 2024). Saint Lucia's tourism led growth in 2024 at 3.7%, while Antigua and Barbuda's digital nomad programme and luxury focus delivered estimated growth of 6.3% for the year. The OECS Commission projects continued tourism-led expansion through 2025, supported by reconstruction investment in Grenada and continued Citizenship by Investment inflows across the four programme-running states. This sustained growth trajectory creates ongoing demand for destination perception research, visitor satisfaction tracking, and resident sentiment studies examining how growth is experienced by local populations alongside tourists.

Climate vulnerability is a defining characteristic of all six OECS markets and one that increasingly shapes research agendas. Hurricane Beryl's July 2024 Category 4 track directly over Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines caused an estimated J$4.73 billion in agricultural losses in Jamaica alone and affected tourism infrastructure in Grenada (CARICOM Secretariat, 2024). For consumer research purposes, post-disaster studies that track the pace of consumer confidence recovery, shifting product preferences toward more resilient food sources, and changed financial behaviour including insurance purchase intent are commercially valuable to a range of client types including insurers, FMCG companies, and financial services providers. HRG has developed a post-disaster consumer tracking methodology specifically for Caribbean small island contexts following repeated requests from clients for structured recovery monitoring research.

Across all six OECS markets, the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank's data infrastructure provides a valuable foundation for secondary research. The ECCB publishes quarterly economic reviews, financial sector reports, and balance of payments data that anchor primary research in verified macroeconomic context. The OECS Commission's statistics portal at oecs.int provides demographic and social indicator data. These regional data sources, combined with the Caribbean Development Bank's project pipeline tracking for infrastructure and development investments, give HRG's research team the secondary data grounding to design well-contextualised primary studies and interpret fieldwork findings within their correct economic environment.