The Extreme Geography Behind The World's Richest Countries

The Extreme Geography Behind The World's Richest Countries: a frozen coast where barely two percent of the land can be farmed, a desert with no rivers at all, a jungle that swallows most of the country, a country with a quarter of its land below the sea and an island so short of land it had to build more of itself. These are eight of the richest countries in the world, ranked by GDP per capita adjusted for prices. And in almost every case, the terrible geography isn't what they had to overcome. It's where the money came from.

This is economic geography, one country at a time, counting down from eight. Number eight is Australia, the driest continent people live on, which once banned the export of its own iron ore; today Australia iron ore is its biggest export. Number seven: Iceland aluminium, made without a single aluminium mine, with electricity from volcanoes and glaciers. Number six: the Netherlands below sea level, and the river mouth that made Rotterdam Europe's biggest port. Number five: Guyana oil, and a jungle that now gets paid to stand still. Number four: why is Qatar so rich? It shares the biggest gas field on Earth with Iran, and this year it learned what it means to be rich behind the Strait of Hormuz. Number three: why is Norway so rich? A well that was almost never drilled, Troll A, and the Norway oil fund. Number two: the Luxembourg economy, where almost half of the workers live in another country. And number one: why is Singapore so rich with almost no land at all? Its spot on the Strait of Malacca.

GDP per capita here is the IMF's figure adjusted for prices (PPP). The geography of wealth has one more ingredient we don't hide: very few people to split the money between. Geography explained with maps: subscribe to Fortune of Nations for more of the richest countries and the strangest economies on Earth.

0:00 Where the money actually is
0:25 Eight richest countries, ranked
0:47 #8 Australia: too dry
1:18 The flight through the gorge
2:02 #7 Iceland: fire and ice
2:55 The Cod Wars
3:14 #6 Netherlands: below the sea
3:44 Rotterdam
3:59 1953 and the Delta Works
4:40 #5 Guyana: the jungle
5:16 The oil under the sea
5:38 The forest that gets paid
6:07 #4 Qatar: too hot
6:27 When the pearls ran out
7:05 Rich behind a strait
7:40 #3 Norway: too cold
8:35 The world's biggest savings fund
8:56 #2 Luxembourg: no sea
9:13 Iron, steel, then funds
9:47 #1 The country with no land
10:24 Building land out of sand
11:00 What the eight have in common
11:35 The richest country not on this list

Watch next: Why Switzerland Is So Rich With No Resources

Sources (with links): see the pinned comment.

Map data & imagery:
Elevation: AWS Terrain Tiles (Mapzen) · Natural Earth – public domain
Satellite imagery (Singapore 3D shot): Sentinel-2 cloudless – https://s2maps.eu by EOX IT Services GmbH (contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data), CC BY 4.0

Music and sound effects: original, made for this video.

#Geography #Economics #RichestCountries