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The Bottom Billion
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The Bottom Billion

Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

Paul Collier
Oxford UP, 2007
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Editorial Rating

9

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  • Innovative

Recommendation

getAbstract finds that this concise, clearly written and hard-hitting book by Paul Collier, one of the world’s leading experts on Africa, is a must-read for anyone concerned with development, economic justice, trade, immigration, terrorism and related issues. The author has scant patience with sacred cows of either the right or the left. He penetrates the fictions and fantasies that have helped drive not only unproductive but actually counterproductive policies on aid, trade, investment and more. The book is enlightening, and entertaining in the way that good satire is entertaining. It is also inspiring, since Collier goes beyond merely identifying problems: He offers credible suggestions for solutions.

Summary

The Poorest

The world’s poorest countries, a group of 58 nations with roughly a billion people, have some distinctive things in common. While the rest of the world has been getting richer, they have been getting poorer. Their decline is absolute, not merely relative. Some, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are economically worse off now than in 1960 or 1970. These countries are caught in one or more of four traps: the “conflict trap,” “the natural resource trap,” the trap of being “landlocked with bad neighbors” and of “bad governance in a small country.”

Some suffer from a conflict trap, including civil wars and “coup rebellions,” that both results from and produces poverty. However, violent conflict is not the only trap to spring shut on these countries. A rich endowment of natural resources can be a trap that makes it difficult for countries to develop. A landlocked country whose neighbors have bad policies and weak infrastructures faces an enormous obstacle to development. Poor governance is also a trap. These traps prevent growth, which poor countries desperately need. The idea that growth is good may still be somewhat controversial, however...

About the Author

Paul Collier is professor of Economics and director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University. Formerly director of development research at the World Bank, he also wrote Breaking the Conflict Trap.

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