London — Mozambique has made the largest gains of any country in the DHL Global Connectedness Index, putting it in 113th place out of the 140 countries covered: in the 2011 Index, Mozambique stood in 130th position.

The logistics company DHL takes over a million data points measuring international flows of trade, capital, information and migration to develop an index of how far countries are integrated into the world economy.

According to this year’s Index, Holland is the most connected country, followed by Singapore and Luxembourg.

Mauritius is the most integrated country in Africa, lying in 46thh place, South Africa is in 48th position, and other SADC (Southern African Development Communities) that are better integrated than Mozambique are Angola, in 90th position (undoubtedly due to oil exports), Madagascar (107th – despite the country’s isolation following the 2009 coup d’etat), Namibia (109), and Zimbabwe (111).

Mozambique jumped 17 places since the previous annual Index, which is a continuation of the country’s trend of increasing integration that has been noted since DHL began calculating the Index in 2005.

Madagascar has fallen from 87th position in 2011, and in that year there was not enough data for DHL to rank either Angola or Zimbabwe.

The world’s least connected country is Burundi, with the Central African Republic being next to last. However, it should be noted that several countries are still not covered by the Index, including Swaziland, Lesotho, Tanzania and both Congos.

The main finding of the DHL report is that globalization has stalled. The international financial crisis has severely affected investment and trade, with the result that “the world as a whole is only slightly more globally connected than it was in 2005 and notably less connected than it was in 2007”.

“That is a striking finding”, DHL remarks, “since only a few years ago globalization was being celebrated or decried – depending on one’s perspective – as an inevitable trend or unstoppable force”.