ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how the ghost of a colonial past and post-independent future has conspired to create poverty traps across much of the tropics in recent times. It shows how the geographic expansion of these traps has created a new, braided system of counter-flowing resources, people and money. The tropical nations have achieved a positive trade balance, fossil fuels and minerals typically loom large among the resource-dependencies. Unlike many Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations where agriculture and forestry continued to increase in value while declining in their contribution to GDP, in tropical countries they declined in both value and contribution. The OECD and other extra-tropical nations principally benefit from the flow of private funds through trade and foreign direct investment, but privately funded inflows to tropical nations occur largely through remittances. There are both positive and negative consequences of immigration to both originating and recipient nations.
