The world has changed radically over the past four decades. Not only has it become digitized and connected thanks to the internet—a concept that didn’t exist in the early 1980s, except to a small number of experts and academics—but it has also grown significantly. According to the World Economic Forum, based on data from the World Bank, the world’s population has doubled over the past forty years, while GDP has quadrupled.

But this growth was not uniform. Southeast Asia takes the cake in terms of economic growth, with an average annual GDP growth rate of 5.6% during that period. Latin America, by contrast, performed much more modestly, with GDP growth of 2.3% during that period. This was despite the favorable conditions of the 1990s, when the region’s most significant economic reforms were implemented, and the commodity price boom between 2002 and 2011.