The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can be Done About it

Political correctness requires that we separate the world into two categories when talking about development - the developed and the developing nations, with one billion people living in the first set, and the other five making up the rest. These categories are insufficient, says Paul Collier, because there are some countries that are not developing, but actually moving backwards: the bottom billion, a "ghetto of misery and discontent", who are getting poorer every year. "Picture this," he writes, "as a billion people stuck in a train that is slowly rolling backwards downhill."

This is a book about that bottom billion, and the unique development challenges that they pose. In particular, Collier addresses four distinct 'traps' - landlocked countries, conflict, poor governance and natural resources, and explores some innovative solutions for overcoming each one.

While not without controversy, especially around his advocacy of military intervention, The Bottom Billion is refreshingly low on ideology and high on hard data. The whole book is based on original research, making this a valuable contribution to the debate for both experts and casual readers alike.

I can't really weigh this book relative to others on the subject, because it's the first that I've read on this topic...

But what I wanted to add to the other reviews is that, if you're someone like me, who does not work/study economics or international development, I can recommend this book without hesitation. It's a fascinating read and it's accessible for any background of reader.

After reading you'll probably feel a sense of frustration at how much more could be done and how much of our current efforts may be misdirected. But this is an improvement on the sense of hopelessness I had prior to reading the book; that the truly poor nations will always be that way.

In my work over the last few years, struggling with the issues of development and poverty reduction, and I read a lot of books on the issues. Recently, I read one of the best books in the form of Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion.
Just as Mr. Collier says at the end of his book, discussions on poverty and development have over the last few years been dominated by two extremes: On the one extreme Mr. Jeffrey Sachs call for more aid to "end poverty", and on the other side, William Easterly's negativity that nothing really works (in the books The End of Poverty and The White Man's Burden, respectively).
Mr. Collier strikes a marvelous and necessary balance between these two. On one side, he says about Mr. Sachs:
"At present the clarion call for the left is Jeffrey Sach's book the end of poverty. Much as I agree with Sachs' passionate call to action, I think that he has overplayed the importance of aid. Aid alone will not solve the problems of the bottom billion - we need to use a wider range of policies."
Mr. Sachs is an advocate of more money will solve the problems, but as Mr. Collier puts well in the book, many of the problems related to poverty are structural, from lack of investement, infrastructure, education, conflict, to being landlocked. Some of these problems are not solved just with more money. Unfortunately, this is a tendency in development aid nowadays, perhaps as aid agencies and staff need to justify their existence, even increase it: the need of more money, much of it in the form of budgetary support, which goes directly to a poor country's budget, in ever bigger amounts. But the link to poverty reduction is awkward to say the least: as pointed out in both Easterly's and Collier's book, higher dependence on foreign aid hardly leads to poverty reduction.
How much did I see this in Mozambique: had any of the subsistence farmers I worked with ever benefitted from the Agricultural SWAp...?
Nevertheless, while one cannot argue that aid will help everything, one can not jump into the other side of "Nothing helps" like the old disillusioned Mr. Easterly does (in my personal view Mr. Easterly is the kind of person who would have let slavery continue, not because he agreed with it, but because "we cannot do anything about it"):
"At present the clarion call for the right is economist William Easterly's book The White Man's Burden. Easterly is right to mock the delusions of the aid lobby. But just as Sachs exaggerates the payoff to aid, Easterly exaggerates the downside and again neglects the scope for other policies. We are not as impotent and ignorant as Easterly seems to think."
As Collier amply argues for, there are many situations and examples that aid has helped and alleviated poverty. But as Mr. Collier also amply discusses and argues for, the aid money needs to be allocated in a well-planned way, and not ignoring the context: aid alone is unlikely to help.
I must admit that at first I found the book to start really slowly: Mr. Collier took time to explain his framework for analysis, ennumerating four "traps" which developing countries, or rather, the "bottom billion", the poorest of the poorest caught in a vicious circle of misery of landlockedness, resource trap, conflict and bad governance. These four traps are inter-related and Mr. Collier carefully presents his huge array of statistics to present his argument.
This part was a somewhat tedious read, but after passing this part, the book moves into more interesting areas, namely what can be done about it, the huge dilemmas and difficulties surrounding these issues.
Nevertheless, on a more critical view, the book's argument is built too much on statistics. It makes it powerful, but at the same time one can feel that the argumentation, like with all statistics, is political and absolutist: in social sciences, there are exceptions to all statistics! At the same time, some of the correlations, like for instance between post-conflict situations and democracy, seem so vague that I would never look at a specific situation with that data, but only focus on the context.
Personally, I like that he says it can be done - too often in the world people say: "there have always been poor people, and there always will be". While I don't deny this is true, I find it appalling that this should be used as an excuse: we have always had murders, rape, wars, but nobody in their right mind would say we should do nothing about it!
I like the book, because we finally have a well-written balance abut development aid, something that has been missing for a while as the issue is discussed more and more.

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.

While this is a scholarly economics textbook, the author makes a deliberate and commendable effort to keep the language, structure and flow of complex ideas accessible and captivating to the general reader. Its scope and inspiration is universal but the studies are mainly centred on poor African countries caught in various traps: of conflict, dependence on natural resources, bad governance and unfavourable geography including unhelpful neighbours, harsh topography and bleak climate. Collier's basic message is upbeat: none of the traps is inescapable, in spite of the current low rate and low probability of sustained exit from a trap for the billion or so living in the no or negative growth countries.

In the first part of the book, the author draws on extensive in-depth collaborative research to make very subtle analyses of the relationship between conflict and under development. Regrettably, the end result has sometimes the ring of the medieval disputations on the sex of angels. The direction of causation is rarely straight forward even after exhaustive wading through pools of data.

The problem of human as well as financial capital flight as an obstacle to economic growth is dealt with at greater length and cogency. The new approach here involves treating the emigration of skilled and unskilled labour and expatriation of financial resources in the same way as a risk mitigation strategy for the individual. To retain both funds and skills will require elimination of the perceived investment risk profile of the country.

But how can we reduce the growth-negating resource capture by the elite, from aid, natural resources such as oil and minerals? Collier cites the impact of the Extractive Resources Transparency Initiative and the Charter on Blood Diamonds as instances of a fairly effective multilateral approach.

The author further explores the self-perpetuating monster of poor governance, underscoring the need to put in place effective mechanisms for restraint: electoral competition, checks and balances, an independent judiciary and a free press. He shows how publicising budgetary allocations and disbursements for specific projects in the media allows for and encourages follow up by beneficiaries and vigilance by civil society groups to minimise or eliminate leakages. With a wry sense of humour, he advocates the repeal of the law of the political jungle, aptly termed "the survival of the fattest", noting that where patronage politics is feasible, electoral competition encourages the bribery of opinion makers or community leaders instead of using the provision of public services as an electoral argument, leaving the corrupt as the winners.

Should military intervention be an option? Contrasting Iraq and Kosovo, Somalia and Sierra Leone, he sees it as an option that should not be discarded but rather managed with utmost care and resolve. Will freer international trade, as promoted by WTO, help the poorest countries break out of the traps? Collier has doubts and makes a case for the AGOA type of initiative which involves positive discrimination; a handicap race where the Asian front runners have their feet shackled in tariffs to facilitate the entry of products from the poorest African countries. But beyond the traditional instruments of aid and trade, the emphasis of the G8 and other actors in development needs to shift towards issues of security strategies coupled with the application of internationally sanctioned norms and standards of equity and governance.