Geography and Socioeconomic Development in Latin America and Caribbean

Introduction Geography has strong and pervasive effects on economic and social development. On a worldwide scale, geographical patterns are especially dramatic (Figure 1). The tropics are almost uniformly poor, and few of the nontropical countries are among the poorest. If geography were unimportant, one would expect to see similar economic conditions throughout the world, subject to some random variation. In fact, poor countries are rarely interspersed in the richer regions, and those few rich countries in the poor regions are usually readily explained by oil or other high-value natural resource deposits.