The survey instrument used to collect the logistics data is a detailed questionnaire distributed to experienced logistics practitioners (freight forwarders) in 140 economies.<sup>4</sup> The aim was to focus on the detailed policy and institutional issues reflected in actual operational practices faced day to day in a country by private firms and by the freight forwarders serving as their intermediaries. Freight forwarders are in an excellent position to provide information on logistics, since private firms in most countries use the services of freight forwarding companies to ship their products into and out of the country.<sup>5</sup> A pilot survey of 17 carefully selected economies representing different regions and income levels was used to refine the questionnaire before its use in the larger set of economies. The survey asked separately about imports and exports. In addition, because landlocked economies face a unique set of difficulties, these were separated from coastal economies.

This paper uses the results for 80 of the 140 economies covered by the survey: 17 in SubSaharan Africa, 12 in Central and Eastern Europe, 12 in Latin America and the Caribbean, 11 in East Asia, 8 in the Middle East and North Africa, and 5 in South Asia, as well as 15 major industrial countries (see appendix table A.1)<sup>6</sup> . The economies in the data set range widely across regions, income levels, and extent of economic liberalization, and some face the special challenges of being landlocked and therefore dependent on transit countries’ infrastructure services for access to ports. The sample includes 70 coastal and 10 landlocked economies.

To ensure that the data reflect the conditions that a typical firm or intermediary would encounter, survey participants were asked to base their responses on the institutions and services faced by the typical medium-size firm in a country—not on cases where there might be “special conditions or privileges,” such as for firms located in a free trade zone. In Bangladesh, for example, a garment manufacturer located in an export processing zone might be able to clear a container of raw material imports within a day. But for a garment manufacturer located outside the zone, it would take 9 days to clear a similar container through customs alone and another 8 days for port and terminal handling through Chittagong port. It is this case, indicating conditions in Bangladesh for a typical manufacturer, that the survey was designed to capture. To guide the responses of practitioners to reflect these “on the ground” physical, policy-related, and

> 4 Paul Roberts (a former faculty member and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Transportation and Logistics) and Peter Yee (with Consilium International Inc.) were involved in designing this questionnaire.

> 5 Panalpina, with a worldwide network of offices and agents, was the primary provider of the data. In some countries other forwarding agencies provided supplementary information.

> 6  Selected key logistics indicators for the remaining 60 countries are also available.  The data for the 80 countries were more comprehensive especially on the cost figures.

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