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Comment by phobosdeimos | Hacker News Reader

Nothing stopping Portugal from becoming successful. Germany isn't really as rich as people think though: lot of hidden poverty.

My own country was in very dire straits after WW2 and it took a lot of work and clever scheming to get on top.

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Germany has massive geographical advantages compared to nearly every other country in Europe, especially compared to Portugal. East-west and north-south navigatable rivers, few mountains, very fertile soils, located in the center of Europe covering two seas... Italy has a similarly spiderwebby location, but a much more difficult topography.

If someone wants to learn more about this stuff, geopolitics, Tim Marshall has written a pretty neat book about the topic which was a quick, fun and mind-expanding read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25135194-prisoners-of-ge...

You're talking about a country that's pretty much half coastal area and has some rivers.

Though Portugal is mountainous, it is not a huge impediment

If you want to lay Italy’s economic problems on geography you probably have to explain why it wasn’t a problem for the Roman Empire or Renaissance city states.

Hmm? No, that‘s definitely not what I said. Geography is one factor that can influence population density and interconnectedness, among other things, but these parameters have different effects in different times. Rivers are much less important today than in the middle ages.

Geography is one historical factor in the multiparametric space shaping the wellbeing of a nation. Political culture is another one.

And those advantages matter not at all for successful IT ventures. Sweden does not have any of those advantages, and are still even way more successful than Germany (on a per capita basis).

Which is what I emphasise below. But it mattered when it came to the development of trade routes, knowledge centers, the industrial revolution and the emergence of large corporations.

And the US Marshall Plan from which Portugal and Spain did not directly benefit.

Yes, the geopolitical situation with the Cold War helped Northern Europe. But don't underestimate the vast amounts of money the EU has invested in Spain and Portugal since the 1970s.

Lots of money yes, but not that well invested. Scratch the surface of EU funding and you find a long procession of malinvestment and wasted opportunity. Airports being a famous case in point:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/1129678...

Portugal did receive help from the Marshall Plan. Not much (70 million, only Iceland received less at 43 million), but it got it

Well, Portugal and Spain were not really affected by the war. They were, however, affected by the isolationist dictatorships that they had to suffer under for another 30 years.

Let me remind you of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, and its hefty toll on Spain. Like all civil wars, it never really ended.

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