Botswana slips in trade logistics� rankings

Boitshepo Majube | Friday March 28, 2014 14:20

The only sector that Botswana scored below hundred is in the logistics quality and competence in which it is ranked 99 out of 160 countries. In customs Botswana is ranked 112, infrastructure 125, internal shipment 129, tracking and tracing 127 and timeliness 103.

The best-ranked country is Germany with a score of 4.10 while the least ranked is Somalia with a score of 1.77. 

The report is the fourth edition of ‘Connecting to Compete: Trade Logistics in the Global Economy’. Logistics performance is strongly associated with the reliability of supply chains and the predictability of service delivery for producers and exporters. The report states that supply chains are becoming more and more complex, often spanning many countries while remaining critical to the national competitiveness.

As in the first three editions, high-income countries dominate the top ten ranking, and have remained relatively unchanged, as most of these countries are major well-established logistics players with a dominant role in global or regional supply.

It also states that all 10-bottom economies in the ranking are low-income countries, and 6 are in Africa. “Countries where armed conflict and civil unrest disrupt supply chains and the business environment in general seem to be particularly affected,” it said. In the low-income group, Malawi and Kenya are the lead performers.

The 2014 Logistics Performance Index (LPI) provides expanded data on import and export supply chains in 123 countries, including information on time, cost, and reliability. Other factors are ratings on domestic infrastructure quality, the performance of core services, and the friendliness of trade clearance procedures. 

The report states that information in this report is relevant for policymakers and the private sector to identify priorities for reform of their soft and hard trade logistics infrastructure. The report findings highlights that the gap between the best and worst performers is slowly narrowing, “thanks to improvements in infrastructure and border clearance.”  It adds that mature logistics services market is distinctive of the high performing countries, and to achieve efficient border clearance, improvements are needed in customs and other control agencies.

The report findings also highlight that countries that implement sound reforms tend to outperform their peers at a given development stage. “A new generation of reforms tends to be more complex and span across many sectors,” the findings revealed, further stating that the attention to green logistics is growing but remains concentrated in high-income countries.

“So developing countries will have to not only consider the environmental footprint of their logistics, especially in trading with developed countries, but also revisit governance and operational models for environmentally friendly infrastructure and related transport modes, especially railways, that seem to perform poorly relative to those in the top performers,” it advised.