The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has maintained its Arab leadership in providing logistics services while strengthening its position in the global ranking of this vital indicator for measuring facilities for trade exchange and trans-shipment of goods.
UAE ranked first in the Arab world and 11th globally, followed by Oman, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait.
Egypt ranked seventh in the Arab standings, followed by Lebanon, Jordan and Djibouti, with 67, 79, 84 and 90 respectively. Tunisia, the Comoros, Morocco, Algeria, Sudan and Mauritania followed in the rank, while Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and Libya were placed in last regionally.
This is the sixth edition of Connecting to Compete and the 2018 edition of the Logistics Performance Index (LPI); a World Bank project launched 10 years ago. LPI is a unique benchmarking tool, providing the same measure for more than 160 countries.
The six components of the LPI are: customs, infrastructure, ease of arranging shipments, quality of logistics services, timeliness, and tracking and tracing, point to policy actions that can support the improvement of each individual element, according the Credit Libanais’ analytic newsletter.
The report noted that the gap between the performance of high-income and low-income countries in the 2018 LPI remained high, with the overall result of high-income countries, on average, surpassing low-income countries by 48 percent in their scores.
Over the past several years, high-income countries, most of which are in Europe, occupied the top 10 positions in the LPI rankings. The composition of the 15 best-performing countries has not significantly changed either. But there are major improvements in LPI scores of Japan, Denmark, the United Arab Emirates, and New Zealand since 2012.
Globally, Germany topped the list of countries in terms of performance of logistics services for 2018, with a total score of 4.20, followed by Sweden 4.05, Belgium 4.04, Austria and Japan 4.03.
In the Arab region, United Arab Emirates topped the list with 3.96 points, followed by Oman 3.20, Saudi Arabia 3.01 and Bahrain 2.93.
As for Lebanon, it ranked 79th in the world, up from 82 in 2016, eighth among the Arab countries with 2.72 points, followed by Jordan 2.69, Djibouti 2.63, and Tunisia 2.57.
