In today's world, income and well-being are widely distributed around the globe. However, there is no systematic trend w

[answerhappygod]

In today's world, income and well-being are widely distributed around the globe. However, there is no systematic trend where the income levels of poor countries get to those of rich ones even slower. In the standard macroeconomic models of economic growth, the real income of the countries per capita depends on their physical and human capital stocks, the marginal products of which are highest when stocks are low relative to unskilled labor stocks. Because high marginal products of investment present strong incentives for capital accumulation, including capital inflows from abroad, the models predict that poorer countries will tend to grow more quickly than rich ones.
However, this turns out to be an exception rather than a rule. The scale of capital flows to the developing world is minimized by the gross flows between advanced countries. Reasons for that are the risks of investing in several of the developing countries limit their attractiveness for investors, both foreign and domestic and those risks are closely related to the countries’ poor economic growth performances. For example, when governments are unable to protect property rights, investors will be unwilling to invest in either physical or human capital, so growth will be nonexistent or low. With that being said comes up the question why have some countries grown very rich while some attract little or no foreign investment and remain in extreme poverty. Two main schools of thought focus on the geographical features and the government systems.
Jared Diamond, a geographer from UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), is a defender of the geography theory. In one version of the geography view, aspects such as climate, soil type, diseases, and geographical accessibility determine country’s economic performance. For example, bad weather, an absence of domestic animals, and the presence of yellow fever and malaria made tropical zones to lag behind the more temperate regions of Europe, which could support agricultural innovations such as crop rotation. For these reasons, Diamond claims, Europeans conquered the natives of the New World and not vice versa. Access to international trade is another issue that certain geographical theories focus on. Countries that are landlocked and mountainous trade less with the outside world and so fare worse than those with good ocean harbors, navigable internal waterways, and easily traveled roadways.
Those who believe that government institutions are the most important component in economic prosperity focus on the government's ability to protect private property rights, which encourages private industry, investment, innovation, and, eventually, economic growth. According to this view, a government that cannot protect its citizens from illegal property confiscation—for example, through blackmail by gangsters or corrupt public officials—leads to a country whose people do not see the pursuit of wealth. This mechanism is one factor underlying the positive association between lower corruption and higher per capita income shown in Figure 11-2. A low corruption level promotes productive economic activity by ensuring investors that the results of their labor will not be illegally seized. However, the positive slope in the figure does not prove that national institutions determine national income. It's possible that the slope is mostly due to richer countries' willingness to go against corruption and the higher resources they have available to do so. If this is the case, it is still possible that geography impacts income levels, which in turn shapes institutions. If, on the other hand, more favorable geography leads to higher wealth and, through higher revenue, to a better institutional environment, the geography school of thinking appears to be correct.
In conclusion, to the question is geography destiny, in my opinion it is because different countries have different characteristics which make them unique. Those features and historical events have formed some nations to be rich and others poor.