This is the fourth edition of Connecting to Compete: Trade Logistics in the Global Economy. It features the Logistics Performance Index (LPI), which the World Bank has produced every two years since 2007. The LPI measures the on-theground efficiency of trade supply chains, or logistics performance. This year's edition covers 160 countries. Supply chains are the backbone of international trade and commerce. Their logistics encompasses freight transportation, warehousing, border clearance, payment systems, and increasingly many other functions outsourced by producers and merchants to dedicated service providers. The importance of good logistics performance for economic growth, diversification, and poverty reduction is now firmly established. Although logistics is performed mainly by private operators, it has become a public policy concern of national governments and regional and international organizations. Supply chains are a complex sequence of coordinated activities. The performance of the whole depends on such government interventions as infrastructure, logistics services provision, and cross-border trade facilitation. Since the first edition, the LPI has shown that good policies matter to develop efficient supply chains but also that many developing countries still lag behind. The "logistics gap" evident in the first three editions still prevails and underscores the importance of consistent policies across sectors (trade, customs, and transportation, for instance). The agenda and priorities are evolving. The imperative of facilitating trade through more transparent and consistent border clearance is now universally recognized-and set in stone in December 2013's World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade Facilitation in Bali, Indonesia. New challenges of environmental sustainability, spatial planning, and the regulation and organization of services are receiving more attention, and not only in rich and emerging countries. The LPI and its components help countries understand the challenges that they and their trading partners face in making their national logistics perform strongly. The LPI complements, rather than substitutes for, the in-depth country assessments that many countries have undertaken in recent years, and many of them with World Bank support. The LPI scores are not to be overemphasized, however-a country's actual ranking or score should not be interpreted in isolation, but instead whether it ranks among the best or worst performers. The LPI allows leaders in government, business, and civil society to better assess the competitive advantage created by good logistics and to understand the relative importance of different interventions. We hope that this fourth edition of Connecting to Compete will continue to support this broad community of policymakers and stakeholders.
