Logistics and transport increasingly play a pivotal role in international trade relations. The Logistics Performance Index (LPI) analyses differences between countries in terms of customs procedures, logistics costs and the quality of the infrastructure for overland and maritime transport. The aim of this article is to analyse the impact that each of these components has on trade in emerging economies using a gravity model. Furthermore, the study also attempts to detect possible advances in logistics in developing countries, which are grouped into five regions (Africa, South America, Far East, Middle East and Eastern Europe) by comparing the first LPI data published in 2007 with the most recent data, released in 2012. The results obtained reveal that improvements in any of the components of the LPI can lead to significant growth in a country’s trade flows. Specifically, LPI components are becoming increasingly important for international trade in many countries in Africa, South America and Eastern Europe.

Many universities are currently doing important work not only on environmental issues, but also on social and economic matters, thereby covering the three dimensions of sustainability. This paper used data envelopment analysis to construct a synthetic indicator based on the variables that make up the UI GreenMetric. The aim was to quantify the contribution of universities to sustainability, rank all campuses accordingly, and evaluate specific aspects of their related institutional policies. First, cluster analysis was applied, yielding four homogeneous groups of universities. DEA was then applied to these clusters in order to construct the synthetic indicator. The proposed indicator, DEA-GreenMetric, revealed that the USA and the UK were the countries that were home to the greatest number of universities actively involved in all aspects of sustainability. In addition, this new index provides a complete ranking of universities, circumventing the issue of the duplicate scores assigned by UI GreenMetric. Finally, it can be seen that greater efforts are required for universities to improve their performance relating to environmental variables (energy, water use, and waste treatment) than to make improvements in infrastructure, transport, or education.