Evaluating the sustainability of national logistics performance using Data Envelopment Analysis

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the sustainability of operational logistics performance within a sample of OECD nations and to compare this to the most widely known national measure, the Logistics Performance Index (LPI), as developed by the World Bank. Data Envelopment Analysis is applied to derive an efficiency score reflecting the degree to which sustainable operational logistics performance (SOLP) is achieved within each sample nation. A comparison between the national rankings achieved under the LPI and SOLP evaluation regimes reveal that there is a statistically insignificant monotonic correlation between them. While one country may be a top performer with respect to one of the evaluation approaches, it does not emerge as such under the other. However, the results of the analysis suggest that logistics industries of the United States, the Netherlands, Norway and Australia are found to be top performers under both approaches, while that of Greece, Korea, Italy and Portugal are found to be poor performers under both. The paper concludes that the SOLP approach provides useful information that supplements that provided by the LPI, but that it better facilitates performance improvements within a nation's logistics industry by helping to identify the sources of inefficiency and the nations which possess benchmark performing logistics sectors.