A thousand dollars or less per person per year in GDP - the consequence of poverty, genocide, years of war, lack of natural resources, poor farm management, and limited access to clean water and health care.

This is the follow-up to 24/7 Wall St.’s Twenty Most Productive Nations. Eighteen of the poorest countries by GDP per capita are in Africa. That is not surprising given the famine and war that have racked the continent for the better part of the last four decades. Contributing to these hardships is that many of these countries were recently territories or protectorates of European nations.

The concentration of poverty and the lack of national productivity would have looked very different five decades ago. In the 1960s, China and India were relatively poor nations, with huge populations, low literacy rates, and tremendous untapped resources. Both nations improved their fortunes through education programs and through the organization of rural populations who were brought to cities to turn raw materials into finished goods.

Most of the poorest nations in Africa do not have effective central governments due to instability and civil war. Corrupt officials at all levels bleed money from the economy, “redirecting” aid from the West and “taxing” whatever the country’s immature industries produce on their own.

Many of Africa’s nations are resource-rich. Some have taken advantage of it. Nigeria is one of the largest oil-producing nations in the world. Meanwhile, other African countries with significant natural resources, like the Democratic Republic of Congo, do not have access to the capital needed to create an infrastructure that could exploit its resources.

The greatest problem for many of these counties is that they have limited means to improve their financial conditions. Some do not have arable land, others have negligible deposits of metal, oil, or gas. Each one been perpetually poor. And with a few exceptions, there is only modest hope that their situations will improve in the decades to come. They must rely on whatever aid they receive from the West, and perhaps Russia and China. They are now and likely will remain the poorest nations.