The Bottom Billion

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...