Lithuania has significantly improved its scores in all areas of the World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index (LPI), and now ranks 29th globally. It has climbed 17 places since the last index in 2014, and leads the region for logistics performance.

Whilst Lithuania’s position improved dramatically, neighbouring countries did not fare as well. Lithuania was comfortably the strongest performer of the Baltic States, with Latvia dropping from 36th down to 43rd position, while Estonia went up one place to 38th. Poland secured 33rd place, down from 31st, while Lithuania’s non-EU neighbours Belarus and Russia struggled, coming in 120th and 99th respectively.

The top ten countries globally were Germany, Luxembourg, Sweden, the Netherlands, Singapore, Belgium, Austria, the UK, Hong Kong and the US.

The Logistics Performance Index is designed to help countries assess their opportunities and challenges in the field of logistics, and to determine how they can improve their performance. The World Bank first published the index in 2007, and it has since been published biannually in 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016.

The LPI allows for comparisons across 160 countries in six key areas: customs, infrastructure, ease of arranging shipments, quality of logistics services, tracking and tracing, and timeliness. This year Lithuania improved in all of these criteria.