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From Diagnosing the Problems to RemediationTrap of being landlocked with bad neighboursOver the past decade economists have discovered the fact that geography also plays animportant role. American economist and author of books on development Jeffrey Sachs 120reached the conclusion that a landlocked position robs a country of around half a per centof its economic growth. Up to 38 % of the people in the bottom billion live in landlockedcountries and 30 % of them live in the interior, in the resource-poor countries of Africa.Of course it’s also clearly possible to object that there are a large number of landlockedcountries around the world that have been very successful. Examples can be easily foundnearby, including Austria, Switzerland and the Czech Republic. 121 Then why are, for example,Uganda, Malawi and South Sudan so poor, when Austria is so rich? Another examplefrom Africa is the landlocked country of Botswana, one of the most prosperous countries onthe continent. The causes of poverty in landlocked countries include the fact that exports ofa majority of raw materials or goods from landlocked countries to global markets dependon the transportation infrastructure in neighbouring countries. Exports from Austriadepend on railways and roads in Italy and Germany, while exports from Botswana relyon the transportation networks in South Africa. Exports from Uganda and South Sudandepend on miserable roads and hundred-year-old decrepit railroads in Kenya. Productionfor export in these countries is very problematic, and given their low domestic purchasingpower, no capital is available to enable production for domestic consumption.On a completely different level, Germany and Italy are more than simple routes to marketfor Austria’s production: both countries are important and very wealthy markets forAustria’s goods themselves. Looking at Uganda’s neighbours, long stagnated Kenya is thebest of the bunch. Its other neighbours are Rwanda, slowly recovering from a bloody genocide,South Sudan, which was devastated by a ten-year civil war, the Congo, the site of themost tragic war in the world since World War II and Tanzania, which itself conducted a warwith Uganda. A review of South Sudan’s neighbours is even worse, even when consideringjust how low Uganda set the bar.120 Jeffrey Sachs is a professor of economics at Columbia University in New York and is an advisor to theSecretary-General of the UN Ban Ki-Moon. After overseeing the shock therapy applied in Poland andRussia in the 1990s, he began to focus on the issues facing developing countries. His book, The End ofPoverty from 2005 received a tremendous response from both proponents and detractors of developmentaid. One argument he makes is that the world would be able to eradicate extreme poverty in20 years if the richer countries of the world tripled the amount of development aid they provide andproperly targeted its use. He based these claims on the improving situation in China and India in theyears before he wrote his book.121 While today’s Czech Republic lags behind the other two countries mentioned in many economic andsocial indicators, its relative backwardness is primarily the result of 40 years of Communism in thecountry. During Austria-Hungary, the Czech lands were among the most industrialized and developedparts of the monarchy and had prospered before during the Middle Ages and after in the first half of the20 th century, when Czechoslovakia was one of the world’s most advanced countries.141