The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier

"In this elegant and impassioned synthesis from one of the world's leading experts on Africa and poverty, economist Paul Collier writes persuasively that although nearly five billion of the world's people are beginning to climb from desperate poverty and to benefit from globalization's reach to developing countries, there is a "bottom billion" of the world's poor whose countries, largely immune to the forces of global economy, are falling farther behind and are in danger of falling apart, separating permanently and tragically from the rest of the world. Collier identifies and explains the four traps that prevent the homelands of the world's billion poorest people from growing and receiving the benefits of globalization - civil war, the discovery and export of natural resources in otherwise unstable economies, being landlocked and therefore unable to participate in the global economy without great cost, and finally, ineffective governance. As he demonstrates that these billion people are quite likely in danger of being irretrievably left behind, Collier argues that we cannot take a "headless heart" approach to these seemingly intractable problems; rather, that we must harness our despair and our moral outrage at these inequities to a reasoned and thorough understanding of the complex and interconnected problems that the world's poorest people face."

The Bottom Billion is an attempt to explain why we haven't yet made poverty history, and just what the limits on aid, intervention and Western attempts to bring the poorest nations up to their level aren't working. Within that it chooses to differentiate between those developing countries that are growing, and those that contain a billion people which show no signs of development at all.

The heart of this book is that it's based on matchless research, exhaustively detailed to show that far from being a war on global poverty we have mainly been bringing up the majority of the world blessed with positive positions and able to respond to reform.

Collier's thesis, that a shift to raising the standards in the bottom nations, is well set out and argued, and is sure to be uncomfortable reading for anyone interested in international development. It is especially scathing of the more aid only approach that is so often pushed, and his work on defining how aid can damage non-developing nations is excellent.

It's a common argument now to rail against the usefulness of charity but Collier also goes out of his way to demonstrate the positives of aid - that without it countries would be relatively worse off, and that simply by tweaking the grounds and remit of aid-led intervention the consequences can be more positive.

Over the course of the book Collier goes on to talk about not just what we can do, but what we should be encouraging these nations to do themselves, and it's worth reading just to get a picture of the complex and often contrary ways in which we'll meaning Western campaigns can actually damage policy and initiatives that encourage growth and alleviate poverty.

It's this last part that may be the hardest for many to swallow, as Collier is absolutely wedded to the idea that only through capitalist expansion can these nations grow. It's something that I personally find hard to accept until I really think it through, but his research and examples do an excellent job of setting out his case, especially in the way he shows that without their own foundations our aid will simply crumble.

It's interesting that he rarely resorts to anything beyond his facts and figures, only talking about the moral or social implications and demands in passing, and then infrequently. I think that's an issue that needed to be addressed more, not out of the liberal guilt that the West have caused or prolonged many of the damaging situations that the poorest find themselves in, but simply because there should be an international duty to people that isn't routed in economic reasoning and selfish realpolitik of benefits versus costs.

Maybe this is the first step though. At the very least its a good way to convince those who would argue against engagement and intervention in these situations using a range of methods.

Also Try:
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_collier_shares_4_ways_to_help_the_bottom_billion.html Paul Collier at TED

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