Are some countries poor because of their geography?

Some economists say yes, at least partly, while others argue that geography explains much less than it seems. It is a long-running argument.

One famous version starts with a question. A politician in Papua New Guinea named Yali asked the American author Jared Diamond why white people had developed so much "cargo", his word for inventions and manufactured goods, while his own people had little of their own. Diamond's book Guns, Germs, and Steel answers that gaps in power and technology between societies come mainly from environmental differences, magnified by feedback loops, and he explicitly rejects the idea that any group is intellectually or genetically superior. He points to Eurasia's head start: 13 large animal species were domesticated there, against one in South America and none elsewhere.

The economist Jeffrey Sachs and others make a more everyday case. Countries on coasts or with water access can trade more easily with neighbours, while tropical countries face disease, extreme weather and lower farm productivity. In 2001, researchers at Harvard found that only two tropical economies, Singapore and Hong Kong, counted as high-income. Landlocked countries grew about 1.5 percentage points more slowly per year than similar coastal ones.

The theory has limits, and its critics push back. Diamond himself notes that until a few centuries ago the wealthiest belt ran from southern Europe through the Middle East to southern China before moving north, which he says shows that today's wealth is not due only to fixed factors such as climate. James Blaut accused Diamond of reviving environmental determinism. And Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson assert that once you control for institutions, being near the equator does not lower income.