I attended the International Transport Forum’s 2025 Summit in Leipzig, which this year was hosted by Chile, one of the 69 ITF member states.  This gave me the opportunity to meet many old friends,  make some new ones and catch up on a range of transport policy issues.

The main theme of the Summit was the resilience of transport systems. I contributed to a panel discussion on ‘Transport Resilience Strategies for Developing and Emerging Economies: Opportunities to Leapfrog’. 

 I argued that, from a logistical perspective, ‘leapfrogging’ was perhaps too much to expect.  Emerging economies can however learn from the evolution of logistics systems in advanced economies over the past few decades.  That was driven by the pursuit of economic efficiency and comprised processes, such as inventory centralisation, just-in-time replenishment and single-sourcing, that generally reduced resilience.

Emerging economies can try to build resilience into their logistics systems at an earlier stage in their development.  This is not so much ‘leap-frogging’ as ‘deviating’ from past trends in more advanced economies.  Businesses and governments in less developed countries can also benefit from the experience and research that has accumulated on supply chain resilience over the past quarter century and take advantage of the suite of digital tools and platforms that have been commercialised in recent years.

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