What Countries are Tops in Logistics 2018?

Every couple of years, the folks at the World Bank (which is headquartered in Washington DC, if you didn't know) publish a report analyzing the logistics competencies of most nation's across the globe - 160 of them this year, the same as in the last report issued in 2016.

The 2018 report was released in late June. For whatever reason, the excellent report does not receive much press coverage in the US - try Googling it to see - so at this late date I am going to summarize it here anyways, since I suspect few readers have seen anything much about it.

This is the sixth such effort. And let's just agree that it is good the big thinkers and high rollers at the World Bank recognize logistics is a critical element of a country's competitiveness.

The report notes, for example, that "For individual countries, logistics performance is key to economic growth and competitiveness. Inefficient logistics raises the cost of doing business and reduces the potential for both international and domestic integration."

Later, it notes that "the logistics sector is now recognized almost everywhere as one of the core enablers of development."

We all know that, but it's good to see the World Bank say it too.

The core of the report is a ranking of those 160 nations from top to bottom based on what is called the Logistics Performance Index (LPI), based on a combination of six different attributes.

There is a bit of a change here, with this year's report emphasizing a normalized score based on yearly results from 2012, 2014, 2016 and this year, albeit in a weighted fashion, so 2018 counts more than 2016, etc.

The World Bank gives a good rationale as to why this makes sense, related primarily to vagaries in scoring from year to year, as clearly occurs. However, that approach also doesn't per se fully recognize country improvements in recent years.

Fortunately, the ratings for just 2018 are included in an appendix, and that is what I am going to concentrate on here.

Before explaining how the scores are determined, let's get right to the results.

This year, Germany remains the top spot for the third report in a row, while Sweden moves from 3 to 2. The US fell from the 10 spot in 2016 to a rank of 14 in 2018, continuing a downward trend that is worrisome.

Afghanistan, Angola, and Burundi took the bottom three spots, only because North Korea was not included in the rankings. Syria was a bottom three finisher in 2016, was also not evaluated this year.

The six attributes that go into the LPI are as follows:

• The efficiency of customs and border clearance ("Customs").
• The quality of trade and transport infrastructure ("Infrastructure").
• The ease of arranging competitively priced shipments ("Ease of arranging shipments").
• The competence and quality of logistics services - trucking, forwarding, and customs brokerage ("Quality of logistics services").
• The ability to track and trace consignments ("Tracking and tracing") .
• The frequency with which shipments reach consignees within scheduled or expected delivery times ("Timeliness").