Background:

In 1993, the Protocol of Guatemala was signed to the General Treaty of Economic Integration; this event marked the relaunching of the integration process in the economic sphere. In this new stage, the integration process is part of a strategy of international insertion of the region within a context of international fragmentation of production. The main objective of this paper is to estimate quantitatively the degree of contribution of the productive sectors to the Central American economic integration process.

Methodology:

This article elaborates a ranking of the productive sectors according to the quantitative contribution to Central American economic integration process between 2005 and 2016. Three criteria and ten indicators are used to calculate a compound index. In addition, a characterization of the productive sectors of the ranking is carried out through five complementary indicators.

Results:

The results allowed the identification of 15 sectors that were ranked from highest to lowest according to their contribution to the process of economic integration between 2005 and 2016. Seven sectors base their participation in the ranking in a high degree of commercial and productive complementarity (Criteria 1), six in the diversification of exports (Criteria 2), and only two in a competitive insertion in international markets (Criteria 3).

Conclusions:

It is concluded that there has been little variation in the ranking structure between 2005 and 2016; a weak competitive insertion of Central America in global trade; a prevalence of industry in the ranking, and a low level of knowledge embedded in production and the predominance of the United States and Dominican Republic as main extraregional destinations of the sectors that are part of the ranking. Lastly, the majority of presence of Guatemala and El Salvador in intraregional trade of the selected sectors demonstrates that the achievement of a balanced participation of Central American countries is still a pending challenge of the integration process.