re: What keeps countries and regions from progressing?

If anyone gave you the honest answer we’d be banned.

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Stop fricking helping all the damn time. We are making it worse.

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Yup. Giving to Oxfam, giving to bums... people do that shite so *they* can get a little dopamine rush. It's profoundly selfish, and in general people should better analyze their real motives in anything they do.

Holy Wall of Words Batman.

Geography plays a big part in this answer. Like most things, geography isn't fair either.

When Agriculture started, if you were lucky enough to be born next to the coast of a sea or ocean way back before we had trucks, railroads, and airplanes to move goods, then your settlement could not only export excess goods on the water but also import goods that could help your society prosper in mass. The more you exported, the more wealth you generated, the more your community flourished.
If you were born in a landlocked country, then you had to rely on caravans at best. Even if your origin was next to a substantial water source and that waterway source dropped in elevation (Waterfalls) to make it unnavigable, you could not use it for transport. It even has a lot to do with where those navigatable rivers go. For example, if they empty in the arctic ocean, like many in central and eastern Europe, utilizing that waterway for only a few months in the summer doesn't get you very far. You are better than those poor SOBs in landlocked areas but not much better. So your society will only produce what it needs to survive because creating more than is necessary without a way to sell it is wasteful, and very little wealth is generated. You might have wealthy landowners in that society, but that society would be considered poor as a whole. That was how commerce worked for thousands of years most if not all shipping was on the water.

Now fast forward 10,000 years, and some areas have prospered. There has been a vast divide generated over these 10,000 years, and now we can start to transport things over land and in the air more efficiently. Where do we build these roads, railroads, and airports? We make them between the prosperous areas to move goods more effectively. Believe it or not but we are still in this building phase. The areas that are not prosperous do not get the railroad, or highways, or airports. They get the one or two-lane roads that that big trucks can't quickly get through. And why would they? They have no goods to transport, and they have no wealth to buy goods.

Only Switzerland that I know of as a landlocked hard to get to place in the world, found a way to become wealthy, but that is because they profited on the fact it is hard to get there. People like to bank where it is hard to break in and out of.

Is this the answer to your question? Maybe or maybe not, but I bet it has a lot to do with the why.

Culture.
No amount of education, economic aid, or political change will do anything without the right culture to take those things and do something with it.

I forget what African country was being discussed, but a native who immigrated to the US said that the culture there demanded that if you open a business, you give all your family and friends free shite and if you don't , you will be shunned.

Only way to advance yourself there is to become part of the corrupt government structure or move to another country.

According to some here who have the OT’s fixation, I’d guess “large average penis size”.

Why build a civilization or culture when you can deep stroke and wide bore all day & night?

Corrupt government and leadership

A friend of mine tells why...
LINK

Let's turn that question inward. What keeps Louisiana from progressing?

Why are we consistently ranked as such a poor state with so many local goods and resources used nationally (oil, seafood, salt, etc)?

Why are 3/4 of all billboards here trashy lawyers trying to encourage you to sue others for no good reason?

Why are our roads, education, infrastructure, obesity rates, healthcare, fiscal stability, safety, and environment (i.e., clean air and water) consistently rated as the worst in the United States?

If you can answer why the quality of life here is so atrocious, then you can likely answer it on a larger scale.