[fiter]

I have heard that a reason for a lack of wealth building is because the countries often lack basic infrastructure: peace, rule of law, roads, capital, etc.

I could hypothesize that another problem could be a lack of density combined with bad travel infrastructure.

Of course, your theory could be the major contributor. Or it could be a minor or non-contributor. Because I don't know, I understand the previous poster's request for a reference.

[pdonis]

All of the factors you cite (I think bad travel infrastructure is just a special case of bad infrastructure in general) certainly contribute. International organizations measure all kinds of things like this; here, for example, are the World Bank's governance metrics:

http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/index.aspx#home

However, I have not seen research into the reasons why certain countries do badly on these metrics that hypothesizes any real cause other than lack of charity--wealthy countries just aren't doing enough to help poor countries. The possibility that charity itself might be a contributing cause is never, as far as I can tell, considered. Which just puts us right back to the original question.