How Well Do Goods Actually Move?
The Philippines scores 3.3 out of 5 on the World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index — 4th of 6 ASEAN economies. But the gap between its own best and worst dimension is wider than the gap between it and the regional leader, and that is the more useful number.
The Philippines is not uniformly behind on logistics. It is lopsided: goods arrive on time and then wait at the border.
- Timeliness scores 3.9 and customs 2.8 — an internal spread of 1.1 points, wider than the 1.0-point gap to Singapore on the overall score.
- On customs alone the gap to Singapore is 1.4 points — the widest single-dimension gap in the comparison. One bottleneck, not a general weakness.
- The overall score has risen from 2.69 in 2007 to 3.3 in 2022, a gain of 0.61. The rank has moved between 4th and 6th over the same period.
- This is a survey of freight forwarders, not a measurement of ports. A single round’s movement can reflect who answered as easily as what changed — the World Bank says so itself.
One Country, Six Dimensions
The LPI scores six things separately, each 1 to 5. Reading only the overall score hides the shape, and here the shape is the whole story.
Best: timeliness
Shipments reach their destination within the expected time. This is the part that works.
Worst: customs
Border clearance. Every other dimension sits above it.
Spread
Best minus worst. A country that were uniformly mediocre would have a small spread; this one has a specific problem.
Against The Region
The same six dimensions for the ASEAN-6 in 2022. Note where the Philippine line tracks its neighbours and where it drops away.
Overall rank
At 3.3 against Singapore's 4.3.
Gap to the leader
On the overall score — smaller than the country's own internal spread.
Gap on customs
The widest single-dimension gap here. If one number were worth fixing, this is it.
Seventeen Years Of Rounds
The overall score across all 7 survey rounds. The rounds are irregular — two to 4 years apart, with the pandemic gap the longest — so the axis is real time rather than evenly spaced categories.
2007 score
The first round the index was published.
2022 score
A gain of 0.61 points over seventeen years.
Rank range
Where the Philippines has sat among these six. The score improved while the rank moved little, because everyone improved.
What A Survey Score Is Not
The LPI is built from questionnaires sent to freight forwarders, who rate the countries they ship to. That makes it useful and it makes it fragile in specific ways.
Respondents change between rounds
A movement of a tenth of a point can reflect a different pool of forwarders answering rather than anything that happened at a port. The World Bank warns against reading single-round movements as trend, and this page does not.
Rank is steadier than score
The whole scale drifts between rounds. Rank within a fixed peer group absorbs some of that, which is why both are published here and why the rank range is quoted alongside the score gain.
The overall is not an average
It is a weighted aggregate computed by the World Bank, and it
does not equal the mean of the six published sub-scores. A check
in checks.sql asserts the difference persists, so
nobody later "simplifies" the page by recomputing it from the
parts.
The Page This Was Supposed To Be
This project was specified as a ranking of 149 Philippine cities on DTI’s Cities and Municipalities Competitiveness Index, with five pillar scores, radar comparisons and year-over-year movement. That page could not be built.
CMCI is closed to scripts
cmci.dti.gov.ph returns HTTP 403 to anything that
is not a browser, and DTI publishes no open feed or bulk
download of the index. The rankings exist; they are just not
fetchable.
So the subject changed
Rather than approximate 149 city scores from nothing — which is exactly what the previous version of this page did — the page now covers a narrower question that can be answered: how well goods move through the country as a whole.
What that costs
Everything sub-national. No city rankings, no pillar radars, no income-class comparison, no population-versus-score scatter. Those need CMCI, and CMCI needs a browser and a person. Stated here so the absence is a decision rather than an oversight.
Method
One fetcher, three CSVs, 294 observations.
Source
World Bank LPI via the WDI API, keyless. Six dimensions plus the overall score, for six ASEAN economies, across 7 survey rounds from 2007 — 294 observations in total.
The scale rides on every row
LPI is a 1–5 survey scale. Read as a rank, a percentage or an index out of 100 it is wrong by a factor, so the scale is carried in the CSV rather than assumed.
Completeness is asserted
A check cross-joins every country, dimension and round and fails on any missing cell — a gap would silently drop a country from a chart or shift a rank.
Ranks are derived and cross-checked
Rank is computed from the scores, then a second check asserts rank order agrees with score order. Two derivations of the same fact catch a flipped sort or an inconsistent tie-break.
Irregular rounds, real axis
2007, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2022. Gaps run from two to 4 years. The trend chart uses a linear time axis; evenly spaced categories would imply a regularity the survey does not have.
Verification
Eight assertions in checks.sql, plus every figure
on this page bound to a query in facts.sql and
re-checked on each build.
Key Findings & Summary
- The Philippines scores 3.3 of 5 overall, 4th of 6 ASEAN economies.
- The weakness is specific, not general. Customs at 2.8 against timeliness at 3.9 is an internal spread of 1.1 points — wider than the 1.0-point overall gap to Singapore.
- On customs alone that gap is 1.4 points, the widest single-dimension gap in this comparison. Goods arrive on time and then wait at the border.
- The score has improved by 0.61 points since 2007, while the rank has moved only between 4th and 6th — improvement that the neighbours matched.
- The city-level competitiveness ranking this page was meant to carry is not here. DTI's CMCI returns 403 to scripts, and inventing 149 city scores is what the previous version did.
Sources & Citations
Every figure on this page traces to one of these, through a CSV in
data/ph-logistics/. Each is checked against its source query on every
build.
World Bank Logistics Performance IndexSecondary
Six LPI dimensions plus overall for six ASEAN economies, 7 survey rounds 2007-2022 — A survey of freight forwarders rather than a measurement of ports
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I wrote a companion post — “Further From Ourselves Than From Singapore” — in simple, everyday words.