The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

by Paul Collier

Hardcover, 2007

Status

Available

Genres

Economics

General Nonfiction

Politics, Government, Law and Public Policy

Nonfiction

All Topics

Collection

Vince Matulionis Collection

Publication

Oxford University Press, (2007)

Description

Global poverty, economist Collier points out, is actually falling quite rapidly for about 80% of the world. The real crisis lies in a group of about 50 failing states, the bottom billion, whose problems defy traditional approaches to alleviating poverty. Here, Collier contends that these fifty failed states pose the central challenge of the developing world in the twenty-first century. This group of small nations, largely unnoticed by the industrialized West, are dropping further and further behind the majority of the world's people, often falling into an absolute decline in living standards. A struggle rages within each of these nation between reformers and corrupt leaders--and the corrupt are winning. Collier analyzes the causes of failure, and offers a bold new plan.--From publisher description.… (more)

Media reviews

The Guardian

At the core of this fluent, thought-provoking book is an analysis of why these states continue to fall behind and fall apart. Civil wars are caused not by colonial legacies or fractious ethnic populations, he argues, but by the appeal of a shot at riches to uneducated, impoverished young men.

User reviews

LibraryThing member drneutron

I had high hopes for The Bottom Billion. It seemed like it would be an interesting discussion of what to do about poverty in the worst economies on the planet. In fact, I think Collier has some good things to say about the subject. Unfortunately, he didn't do such a good job of saying them here.

My

biggest complaint about the book is that it presents ideas without a shred of work to discuss the ideas. What's sad is that he did the work to back up his ideas, and he tells the reader frequently that he did the work. But the nature of a book like this requires the author do more than just tell us about his results. It should let the reader evaluate whether we believe the arguments, and that just isn't possible here. In fact, he didn't include footnotes or endnotes to reference specific works in favor of a bibliography at the end with relatively few detailsto point to a specific paper for a specific issue. The average reader will not have the resources to track down all the papers discussed.

The book could have been really good. It's only 192 pages long, and Collier could easily have doubled the length and put in details of the work behind his discussion. Instead, it just felt like he wanted to throw off a quick book without too much work. If he was concerned about getting bogged down in details, he could easily have used a two-track system where the first half of each chapter is the published material and the second half of each chapter is the detail. Then readers not so interested in the details could just skip over the second track material.

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LibraryThing member grheault

The bottom billion are Africa, Afghanistan, and any nation so bereft it lacks governance and economic development for its people. Caused by four traps: natural resources, repeated civil conflict, landlockedness, bad governance combined with smallness. Remedies: targeted aid for development

infrastructure, trade policies for development, military intervention against coups, codes of ethics for businesses and countries dealing with kleptocracies.
Value to me has been to add complexity to an overly simplified discussion of Africa's many problems. The book is a set of views derived from economic data analysis aimed at teasing out causal arrows: does civil war cause poverty or does poverty cause civil war, eg. Causal conclusions and policy recommendations are thought-provoking, even if flawed. A great discussion opener.
Scathing criticism of aid organizations and old, jaded ways of framing Africa, a door opener to re-thinking a complex of situations with a more sophisticated complex of solutions.

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LibraryThing member ben_a

I have decayed into a skimming/sampling mode at the moment, but overall I have found Collier impressive. I never know quite what to make about arguments sustained by regression models across multiple societies over a limited (50 year) period -- can we trust these correlations, or are they artifacts

of a specific set of circumstances? Can culture really be so neatly excised from the account? This is a quibble, however, with an excellent and thoughtful book. Anyone who wants to understand the disaster in which a fifth of the world finds itself should read it.

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LibraryThing member m_cyclops

Paul Collier moves away from ideologies to bluntly explain why 1/6 of the Earth's population is stuck in extreme, lacerating poverty. His solution is not romantic socialism or heartless capitalism, but a set of tools that go beyond political labels and moves forward to propose a world agenda to

help the people before it is too late.

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LibraryThing member nivramkoorb

This is an important book and people should be aware that global prosperity may never get to a portion of the world due to major systemic issues. However, the problems and solutions raised in this book were pretty basic. Corruption, civil wars(what a surprise). Of course if you give aid to corrupt

governments not much will happen. Unless the developed world chooses to intervene in these countries, I really don't see how this problem can be addressed

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LibraryThing member Fledgist

This is a popularisation of the issues confronting the countries stuck at the bottom of development. What are the causes of this permanent failure and what can be done about it?

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