But none is more topical.

As China's ravenous appetite for raw materials clogs ports around the world, the cost of conducting trade is rising sharply, causing a clamour from businessmen for better transport links, less red tape at customs and more transparent regulations to ease the flow of goods.

Ships in China and India can wait as long as a month for a berth, and up to a quarter of the world's bulk shipping capacity is tied up in port queues, according to industry experts.

Bulk carriers are waiting up to a month to dock in China, adding an estimated $3 million to the cost of each cargo. Freight rates for dry cargoes have doubled in the past six months.

But Matthew Chan, chief executive officer at Singapore's Jurong Port Pte, said the problem in some parts of Southeast Asia was not so much the ports as getting there in the first place.

"For cargo to move from factory to port, you spend almost about a day now on the road before it reaches the port, whereas if there's no congestion it takes about an hour. A lot of savings can be achieved if the infrastructure is put in place to facilitate the movement of goods," Chan said.

Coincidentally, a pair of recent studies has tried to put a cost on this sort of bottleneck.

John Wilson and Tsunehiro Otsuki of the World Bank and Catherine Mann of the Institute for International Economics in Washington graded 75 states according to four trade facilitation indicators. Singapore and Finland stood out for best practice.

They then simulated the benefits that countries ranked below average would derive if they carried out reforms that lifted them just half-way to the average for the whole group.

The results are staggering.

The authors calculated that increased port and airport efficiency would increase trade among the 75 countries by $107 billion; streamlining customs and reducing bribery, by $33 billion; clearer rules and less corruption, by $83 billion; and better service sector infrastructure, such as harnessing the Internet to speed business, by $154 billion.

The combined gains of some $377 billion would represent an increase of about 9.7 per cent in the countries' total trade, they said in a World Bank policy research working paper.

"Our results point not just to a need to focus on customs, but more broadly to address ports, the regulatory environment and particularly the domestic services infrastructure that support economic activity and trade," the authors said.