Geography and wealth
In addition, countries that have a tropical climate face a significant amount of difficulties such as disease, intense weather patterns, and lower agricultural productivity.
[6] Most of the recent studies use national gross domestic product per person, as measured by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, as the unit of comparison.
"[10] The 19th century historian Henry Thomas Buckle wrote that "climate, soil, food, and the aspects of nature are the primary causes of intellectual progress—the first three indirectly, through determining the accumulation and distribution of wealth, and the last by directly influencing the accumulation and distribution of thought, the imagination being stimulated and the understanding subdued when the phenomena of the external world are sublime and terrible, the understanding being emboldened and the imagination curbed when they are small and feeble."
[12] Physiologist Jared Diamond was inspired to write his Pulitzer Prize-winning work Guns, Germs, and Steel by a question posed by Yali, a New Guinean politician: why were Europeans so much wealthier than his people?
Thus the inhabitants of the Eurasian continent have had a built-in advantage in terms of earlier development of farming, and a greater range of plants and animals from which to choose.
Oded Galor, and Ömer Özak examine existing differences in time preference across countries and regions, using pre-industrial agro-climatic characteristics.
[14] The authors conclude that agro-climatic characteristics have a significant impact through culture on economic behaviour, the degree of technology adoption and human capital.
One important determinant of unequal wealth in spatial contexts is significant cultural differences, including issues of attitudes to women and the slave trade.
Given that the slave trade inhibited subsequent economic development, the rugged terrain in Africa has also had a historically indirect positive effect on income.
[18] Diamond notes that modern technologies and institutions were designed primarily in a small area of northwestern Europe, which is also supported by Galor`s book "The journey of humanity: the origins of wealth and inequality".
[20] A dramatic shift in technologies, beginning with ocean-going ships and culminating in the Industrial Revolution, saw the most developed belt move north into northern Europe, China, and the Americas.
Diamond argues that such dramatic changes demonstrate that the current distribution of wealth is not only due to immutable factors such as climate or race, citing the early emergence of agriculture in ancient Mesopotamia as evidence.
[24] Jared Diamond has linked domestication of animals in Europe and Asia to the development of diseases that enabled these countries to conquer the inhabitants of other continents.
[25] Besides, Ola Olsson, and Douglas A. Hibbs argue that geographical and initial biogeographical conditions had a decisive influence on the location and timing of the transition to sedentary agriculture, complex social organisation and, ultimately, to modern industrial production.
[26] The 2001 Harvard study mentions high infant mortality as another factor; since birth rates usually increase in compensation, women may delay their entry into the workforce to care for their younger children.
[36] In a 2009 interview for New Perspective's Quarterly, Singapore's founding father Lee Kuan Yew attributed two things to the country's incredible success.
