The prosperity of nations is determined by many things including trade and resources within a specific country. Often many of the world's powers, including the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and larger nations, offer incentive packages of large loans to emerging poorer countries, whilst placing large interest rates on these loans, meaning that countries become indebted at a very critical point, often selling access to some of their resources as trade offs. The GDP (Gross Domestic Produce) can also be used to assess the wealth or health of an economy, many countries exports vs. imports are imbalanced if resources are tradeable in a country, such as coffee, sugar, oil, gas etc small nations can become wealthier, if imports are greater than exports, however, then generally the economy will be weak. This can, of course, be manipulated by larger nations to enable them to buy more resources from those countries at cheaper rates.
