Abstract
Type of the article: Research ArticleAbstractElectronic commerce growth across Middle East and North Africa economies has increased the importance of logistics capability, shipment visibility, and delivery reliability. This study corrects an earlier United Arab Emirates-only annual time-series framing by aligning the empirical design with the official survey-wave structure of the World Bank Logistics Performance Index. The analysis uses only the official Logistics Performance Index waves: 2007, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, and the 2023 editions. It examines whether logistics competence, measured by the competence and quality of logistics services sub-index of the Logistics Performance Index, is associated with tracking-and-tracing performance and delivery timeliness. Green human capital is used only as a theoretical boundary-setting lens; the empirical construct is explicitly limited to logistics competence because the Logistics Performance Index does not directly measure environmental training, green skills, or workforce sustainability capability. A separate exploratory test uses macro carbon efficiency, calculated as the negative logarithm of World Bank carbon intensity of gross domestic product. The country-wave panel covers 20 conventional Middle East and North Africa economies, with two-way fixed-effects regressions estimated on 116 complete observations from 19 economies. Logistics competence is positively associated with tracking-and-tracing performance (coefficient = 0.519; p-value < 0.01) and delivery timeliness (coefficient = 0.416; p-value < 0.01), while its within-country association with macro carbon efficiency is statistically insignificant. The findings support a conservative logistics-competence/performance association but not claims that logistics competence alone produces cleaner logistics at the macro level.