Competing with Logistics Clusters | Vignettes from the International Experience

Logistics clusters boost logistics efficiency. The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic brought about a common global threat of historic proportions and yielded critical lessons as to the importance of supply chain resilience-from essential medical supplies to consumer goods in responding to such a challenge. Today the world increasingly recognizes the value of adaptive infrastructure and service delivery platforms, often collaborative in nature, to face the “certainty of uncertain situations” at all levels of the value chain. Logistics clusters are at the core of positioning transportation and logistics as a driver of productivity gains, environmental sustainability, resilience, and economic growth. This report contributes to informing decision making, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, to deploy logistics clusters to underpin international and domestic commerce, employment growth, and investment. It provides a practical, action-oriented source of examples relying on the case study approach. Particularly important is the report’s role as a tool to inform decision making to position logistics not as a source of environmental externalities to avoid, but as an indispensable contributor to the decarbonization and resilience plans increasingly adopted in the context of the Paris Agreement or as a matter of basic economic development. The structure of the report is as follows: An opening chapter presents definitional and conceptual issues related to logistics clusters. The report will then present, in turn, the case studies of the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, and Korea. Lessons will be drawn from these cases in separate chapters. Lastly, the report will propose a list of policy questions, derived from the World Bank’s cross-country experience, and attempt to answer them based on the evidence presented in the preceding chapters.