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 1,000 logistics professionals. The World Bank Group’s International Trade Unit has produced the Logistics Performance Index (LPI) about every two years since 2007.

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.

“You can’t just do infrastructure without addressing border management issues,” Arvis said. “It’s difficult to get everything right. The projects are more complicated, with many stakeholders, and there is no more low-hanging fruit.” (source: business-review.eu)