In its 2009 economic report about the region, the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) recognizes “slow advances in competitiveness and productivity” and the government’s “priority to correct structural deficiencies.”

“The measures announced since the end of 2009 by … Raúl Castro point towards imprinting efficiency and competitiveness on the economy with a long-term vision,” says the report, which was published on Friday.

The government will continue to emphasize high value-added service exports — such as healthcare, education, engineering, software development and project management — as a driving force in efforts to raise productivity and competitiveness, the authors of the UN report predict. According to ECLAC, 70 percent of all exports last year were services.

This “requires increasing its size and dynamism for it to spread multiplying effects to the rest of the economy,” the report says.

Service exports don’t create as much positive economic ripple effect as tourism — the engine of economic development of the 1990s — agriculture or manufacturing, which “have not been able to enter a path of modernization,” according to the report.

One of three major factors contributing to Cuba’s laggard 1.7-percent GDP growth last year, according to the ECLAC report, was that credit from suppliers continued to diminish in 2009. Cuba is in arrears with payments to suppliers between $600 million and $1 billion, according to the ECLAC report. Although many foreign suppliers still have funds stuck in frozen Cuban bank accounts, the amount has been continuously shrinking since August 2009, when the state began a step-by-step program of unblocking accounts and paying debts, according to the government. Debt renegotiations are still pending.

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