[thefool]

If you are referring to Africa, there's a good reason multinational corporations aren't opening up shop.

Namely, the multinational corporations of the 1880's and on made such a mess of things that many of the countries now have very little infrastructure and spigot economies where multiple parties jockey for control of the natural resource(s) and hence power in the country.

Barring some sort of radical change, this situation isn't changing any time soon for most places.

The irony is (excepting south Africa and Egypt which have their own histories), the only stable countries where companies might be able to set up shop are the ones with no natural resources, because there's not much to fight over.

[jfruh]

True enough at the moment but you'd be surprised how quickly (using "quickly" on a historical scale, we're still talking years or decades) that can change when economic forces start pushing.

If you had told most Americans just 30 years ago that China would be a land of millionaires and gleaming cities and high-skill factories, they'd be flabbergasted, not least because the country was run by an incompetent Communist dictatorship that had starved millions of its own people for no good reason.