of the Wales distant-water fleet from the 1960s onwards. Retail The retail sector is the largest private sector employer in Wales. The sector has 114,000 employees which accounts for 6.0% of Welsh GVA (gross value added). The retail sector in Wales is considered highly valuable by the Welsh government. Science and technology From 2010 to 2018, Welsh researchers accounted for 4% of UK publications and 0.3% of global scholarly output. Wales is the most efficient of all its comparators in terms of output per expenditure. Wales' research and development funding now accounts for 62% of total expenditure. Wales's citation impact has risen to 1.8. This is 80% above the global average and 13% above the UK average. Wales' proportion of top 5% of the most cited publications is twice the global average. Services & high value-added employment In recent years, the service sector in Wales has seen above average growth; however in 2005 its share of GVA was small compared with most other regions of the UK. Wales does not have a favourable occupational structure, and a relatively high proportion of jobs are in public administration, health and education. Compared to more prosperous parts of the UK, Wales lacks high value added service sector employment in sectors such as finance, business services and research and development. This is partly due to a weaker agglomeration effect, due to the small size of towns and cities in Wales compared to regions within the UK and small countries. Wales like Northern Ireland has relatively few high value-added employment in sectors such as finance and research and development, attributable in part to a comparative lack of 'economic mass' (i.e. population) – Wales lacks a large metropolitan centre. The lack of high value-added employment is reflected in lower economic output per head relative to other regions of the UK – in 2002 it stood at 90 per cent of the EU25 average and around 80 per cent of the UK average. In June 2008, Wales became the first nation to be awarded Fairtrade Status. Telecommunications On 28 November 2006, a trial of a new telecommunications network technology was rolled out in the village of Wick in the Vale of Glamorgan. The new network BT 21CN, offers broadband data transfer speeds of up to 24Mbit/s. Trading Excluding intra UK trade, the European Union and the United States constitute the largest markets for Wales's exports. Recently, with