Collier, Paul. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

International Social Science Review, Spring-Summer, 2008 by Linda G. Quest

Collier, Paul. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. xiii 205 pages. Cloth, $28.

Complex issues of development, poverty, and development-resistant poverty have never been elucidated so readably. Economist Paul Collier deftly integrates and then enhances the foremost theorizing, reporting, and publications on poverty. He hypothesizes massive and accelerating divergence between "Prosperia" (the developed and the developing five billion) and "Catastrophia" (the bottom billion) (pp. 8-12). Catastrophia is in the process of falling behind and falling apart (p. 10). A dismal and possible scenario is "a vast running sore--a billion people stuck in desperate conditions alongside unprecedented prosperity" (p. 193). This is a linear projection from presently visible trends unless alternatives readily imaginable are pursued in the near future. That would provide a better scenario based on convergence--slowly achieved, perhaps over a fifteen to twenty-five year time frame--that raises the bottom substantially. Collier leaves the reader with provocative questions: (1) Can I vote so as to elect officials who will ameliorate trade policy with bottom-billion and near-bottom states, ratify meaningful laws and charters to prioritize good government, and nudge G8 representatives toward prudent and effective commitments? (2) Can I personally utilize networks and connections to improve neighborhoods where bottom-billion states are located? (3) Can I directly assist persons in bottom-billion states with remittances cognizant that NGOs are typically unable to get volunteers for the bottom-most quintile?

Collier identifies fifty-eight countries that fall into the bottom-billion group (p. 7) and warns against aggregating them as all-of-a-kind, although they have smallness in common. He is explicit and coherent about the traps and combinations of traps in which they are caught--conflicts that stem from poverty and that impoverish them further, windfalls of natural resources that make other industries comparatively negligible (Dutch disease), landlocked geography with bad neighbors (sometimes reformable), and bad government in a small country (corruption and cronyism out of all proportion to minuscule size). Collier avoids damaging forecasts or self-fulfilling prophecies (pp. 7, 19). Instead, he provides examples of countries that have missed the boat. These are preeminently African and central Asian (Africa ). He compares and contrasts them with countries that have developed.

Collier objectively analyzes conflict, military intervention, and post-conflict challenges. His list of further traps intersects with perspectives on failure provided in Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), which includes a litany of misfortunes that span history--environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbors, unfriendly trade policies, and society's response to its environmental problems.

Collier elucidates the "curse" of natural resources and foreign aid. He does it so clearly that even an econophobe can understand it and benefit from further reading (see, for example, John Kay, Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets why some nations are rich but most remain poor (2004), and William Easterly, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (2006)). Exemplary countries are prospering and developing without aid or loans (Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore). Countries that have had aid and loans (Liberia, Niger, Sierra Leone, and Zambia) have seldom developed comparably with those that had none. Up to five percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in aid could correlate with some development without necessarily having caused it. More aid appears to make no difference. Aid above seven percent of GDP correlates with developmental deterioration--as corroborated by Collier, World Bank analysts, and students who check the statistical tables, although this remains expert rather than popular knowledge. Resource wealth performs similarly. Bad government is also involved here. The back channel for aid is remittances. Collier calls for encouraging remittances--indeed maximizing them. As yet, it remains an open question at what percentage of GDP remittances become counterproductive.

Bad government is a trap that trumps other traps (Madagascar). Ronald Wraith, a British scholar of public and colonial administration, and Edgar Simpkins, a British political economist, called it accurately: "What Britain did in 500 years Africans in particular are determined to do in 50. This is legitimate; what is not legitimate is to be selective--to say that for certain purposes Africa will move at 10 times the pace of her former guardians in education, the right to vote, parliamentary democracy and technological progress, but reserves the right to travel at a more convenient pace in public honesty" (Corruption in Developing Countries--including Britain until the 1800s (2003), p. 12). Former colonies have had their fifty years. Some avoided the traps, even of resource wealth (Botswana); others succumbed. Some showed Collier that "it is easier to rename countries than to change them" (p. ix).