After correcting for price differences, the country with the highest level of income per capita in 2018 is Qatar, an oil-rich nation in West Asia with a population of about 2.8 million people with an average income level of $94,820 per person (GNI PPP in constant 2017 international $). In 2018, Macao had an even higher income level per capita ($120,376), but the focus here is on Qatar since Macao is a small special administrative region of the People’s Republic of China with a population of 0.6 million. The country with the lowest income per capita level in 2018 is Burundi, a nation in Africa of about 11.2 million people with an average income level of $763 per person. The average income level per person in Qatar is thus 124 times higher than the average in Burundi. In other words, the average person in Burundi earns in one year what the average person in Qatar earns in only three days. Income inequality between countries is thus enormous and from a Qatar perspective the average person in Burundi lives in poverty.

Biogeographic conditions are important for explaining the Agricultural Revolution and current income levels, particularly for the Old World (see Chapter 3). This chapter focuses on some aspects of geographic–human interaction (geo-human interaction) to provide a better understanding for current income levels for the world as a whole. As discussed above, an example of such geo-human interaction is the East–West or North–South orientation of the continents which facilitated the spread of agricultural knowledge. Another example is the extent to which nations have access to navigable waterways (rivers or seas) to facilitate human interaction in terms of trade and knowledge flows.

Following the Civil War, the United States exerted its diplomatic, economic, and military leverage to pursue economic and political interests in Latin America, as it believed that what was good for business was good for the country. The emphasis on national security had not disappeared, but the threats to U.S. borders were less dire than in the past as European countries were generally easing themselves out of the region. Latin American leaders had neither the unified political support nor the military strength required to counter U.S. influence. While certain Latin American policy makers resisted U.S. hegemony, both politically and militarily, others welcomed it. Political and economic elites out of power appealed to the United States for assistance because they believed it could provide stability and wealth. The United States stepped neatly and easily into this political maelstrom. The chapter concludes at the turn of the twentieth century, when the era of intervention began in earnest.

Tracing the history of observations of sunspots by Galileo, flares on the Sun and geomagnetic storms by Carrington, and aurorae, the reader is introduced to the field of space weather: the discipline that studies how energy from the Sun impacts Earth’s technological systems and human society. Background material on the structure of the atmosphere, quantitative reasoning, and systems science are provided as tools for better understanding and conceptualizing the complex interactions of the Sun on modern civilization.

During the 1960s, the effects of the Cuban Revolution – especially in terms of support for guerrilla warfare against U.S. allies – became all too evident, and the United States pursued interventionism with new vigor. This renewed use of power included economic and diplomatic pressures, veiled threats, covert operations, and even invasion. U.S. officials framed the Cold War as a valiant struggle to protect freedom in the hemisphere, and the cases of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Guatemala epitomized the lengths to which the United States would go to fight what it considered to be security threats. In Latin America, many elites supported U.S. policy, but a growing undercurrent of discontent also emerged, which pushed for negotiated conclusions to war and protested against the treatment of so many citizens caught in the middle. They did not share the notion that leftist or even Marxist governments necessarily constituted a threat to national security and global order. This chapter ends with a discussion of the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989.

Part III consists of five chapters with a focus on important aspects of human development. Chapter 10 opens with a discussion on measuring poverty and the speed of its decline, as well as gender equality, and measuring income inequality with an overview of recent changes, both globally and within and between countries. Chapter 11 introduces poor economics, which attempts to better characterize and understand the economic lives of the poor and the decisions they make. This approach uses randomized control trials as its main methodology, briefly discussed in terms of advantages and disadvantages and applied in other chapters. Chapter 12 analyzes population and migration issues by discussing developments in world population, birth rates, death rates, and population pyramids. The impact of demographic transition is then linked to present and future demographic dividends. Problems of migration in terms of refugees and internally displaced persons can be big, but are usually small relative to the demographic forces analyzed previously. Chapter 13 focuses on the importance of education for economic development by discussing the biology of learning and the links with development. The chapter addresses the gender gap in education and the quality of university and basic skills education before discussing a teaching model on tracking students, peer effects, and teacher payoffs (which is then taken to the data). Chapter 14 concludes with a discussion of health issues, including life expectancy, its links with development, differences in health care, and a characterization of the main causes of death. The chapter includes an evaluation of infant, child, and maternal mortality, before discussing two health experiments on deworming and providing school meals.

Mexico’s 1982 announcement that it would be unable to make its debt payment set off Latin America’s “Lost Decade.” All over the region, economies stagnated and millions of people suffered. The international response, spearheaded by the United States, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank, initiated market reforms that would cut state spending, privatize state-run industries, dismantle tariffs, and construct free trade agreements. The neoliberal era had been launched. The reforms and trade agreements that accompanied this new era reflected continued U.S. hegemony but also the ways in which economic power was supplanting military power. Latin America initially found few alternatives to the neoliberal model. At the end of the twentieth century Latin American economies were growing once again, but in many cases they were only returning to where they had been before the crash. With millions feeling economic pain, neopopulist leaders gained momentum. Commitment to free trade agreements also waned as leaders like Donald Trump questioned their benefits. This chapter explores the region’s political economy of the last 50 years.

Poor Economics is the title of a book written by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (2011). Its subtitle is: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. The first chapter shows that in the fight to reduce poverty, development economics has focused on the big questions, such as the ultimate cause of poverty, whether democracy is good for the poor, and if foreign aid is needed. They point to Jeffrey Sachs (2006; The End of Poverty), who argues that poor countries may be stuck in poverty traps, which requires investments they cannot pay for, hence foreign aid is needed. They also point to William Easterly (2007; The White Man’s Burden), who argues that aid has done more bad than good as it prevents people from finding their own solutions.

This chapter describes different modeling approaches to understand the space environment and make space weather forecasts. Different types of models from toy models and empirical models to physics-based models are described and how they are used to understand space. The two major approaches to modeling the space environment – kinetic or magnetohydrodynamic – are described. After defining new statistical and machine learning approaches, a supplement explores Carl Sagan’s list of logical fallacies that are useful for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of arguments.

Part I consists of four chapters to provide an introduction to economic development and an analysis of deep roots. Chapter 1 focuses on the current state of economic development in the world, with a discussion of global regions, land area, population, income level, trade flows, and competitiveness. Chapter 2 evaluates data and methods, with a discussion of the reliability of data sources, an overview of statistics, the importance of creating graphs, and a review of regressions and main problems, and methods to deal with these problems. Chapter 3 starts the deep roots discussion on the (initial) main (biogeographic) causes of differences between countries and regions in the level of economic development. It takes us to the origins of life on Earth and human development, with an emphasis on the importance of the Agricultural Revolution for creating the conditions for building institutions and more rapid economic growth. Chapter 4 concludes the deep roots discussion by emphasizing the role of geographic-human interaction for properly understanding the evolution and shifts in economic development. It focuses on the role of incorporated institution building in migration flows in relation to geo-human interaction to properly understand these effects.