Currently reading Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion.
Excerpt from Chapter four describing one of his ‘growth traps’, being landlocked with bad neighbors.
“All landlocked countries are by definition surrounded by neighbors. Switzerland has Germany, Italy, France, and Austria. Uganda has Kenya, which has been stagnant for nearly three decades; Sudan, which has been embroiled in a civil way; Rwanda, which had a genocide; Somalia, which completely collapsed; the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the history of which is sufficiently catastrophic for it to change its name from Zaire; and finally Tanzania, which invaded it. You could say that at least in recent decades Switzerland has been in the better neighborhood.”
