Significance of logistics in trade promotion.

Byline: S. Kamal Hayder Kazmi

Trade logistics in today's globalized world, plays a significant role in the value and volume of global trade and a chief barrier to trade is poor quality logistics. Through reducing the cost involved in transporting goods high quality logistics services enhance the competitiveness of a country's exports. Researchers revealed that across the board, determinants of trade logistics, like customs procedures, tracking and tracing services, overall infrastructure and logistics competence impact trade comparatively greater than less policy-dependent trade determinants like transport and distance.

Various studies also confirmed that logistics is the main component of today's business operations and believe most critical factors and in success of business, perform a vital role. No doubt, logistics is movement of good from point of origin to point of consumption. To save cost and get additional efficient consequence from specialized service providers, mostly firms rely on third party logistics. The Experts revealed that the growth in trade and logistics are directly proportional to each other.

The trade could be highly enhanced through investments in logistic services and infrastructure.

Moreover, the logistics Industry also in Pakistan's economy, plays a significant role- yet, it is plagued through incompetence in terms of lacking a basic infrastructure; cost and period effectiveness with respect of the supply of goods within and outside the country and thus could perhaps be termed as a child of sorrow. Unfortunately in many aspects Pakistan's logistics system lacks expertise. For instance, Pakistan is one of the best producers of agricultural commodities such as rice, cotton, wheat, sugar, many vegetables and fruits and has sufficient resources to transform the raw materials to finished product; the only need is to bring about synergy among the trade and logistics for which a platform is required in the shape of a separate ministry to address all the challenges.

The Country looses, according to figures issues by the Punjab Board of Investment and Trade, an estimated 40 percent of its production of vegetables, fruits and dairy items because of the lack of a sufficient cold supply chain. Pakistan gets, on average, only 41 percent of the global price on its food exports owing to weak cold chains in the country. Furthermore statistics showed that on the aggregated Logistic Performance Index (LPI) Pakistan is ranked at 95...