The gap between countries that perform best and worst in trade logistics is still quite large, despite a slow convergence since 2007, according to a new World Bank Group Report.
This gap persists because of the complexity of logistics-related reforms and investment in developing countries, and despite the almost universal recognition that poor supply-chain efficiency is the main barrier to trade integration in the modern world.
The Report, Connecting to Compete 2014: Trade Logistics in the Global Economy, ranks 160 countries on a number of dimensions of trade, including customs performance, infrastructure quality, and timeliness of shipments that have increasingly been recognized as important to development.
The data comes from a survey of more than 6,000 logistics professionals. The World Bank Group's International Trade Unit has produced the Logistics Performance Index (LPI) about every two years since 2007.
Jean-François Arvis, Senior Transport Economist and the founder of the LPI project said "The LPI is trying to capture a rather complex reality: attributes of the supply chain."
"In countries with high logistics costs, it is often not the distance between trading partners, but reliability of the supply chain that is the most important contributor to those costs."
In the 2014 LPI report, Germany showed the world's best overall logistics performance.
Somalia had the lowest score.
As with previous editions, the 2014 report finds that high-income countries dominate the world's top-ten performers.
Among low-income countries, Malawi, Kenya, and Rwanda showed the highest performance. In general, the trend across past reports has been that countries are improving and low-performing countries are improving their overall scores faster than high-performing countries.
South Africa made the highest showing in Africa as it is ranked 34 accumulating 3.43 and scoring 77.9 with Ghana occupying the 100th position with a score of 2.63 and 52.1.