The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It 1st Edition

Collier has two recommendations for helping the poor: "narrow the target and broaden the instruments." Narrowing the target means focusing not on the five billion people in the "developing world," for four billion of those people live in countries that are already growing, many of them very quickly. One billion of the world's people (70% of whom are in Africa) are in countries that are going nowhere fast, except - in some cases - down. Broadening the instruments means shifting focus from aid to an array of policy instruments: better delivery of aid, occasional military intervention, international charters, and smarter trade policy.

The most frustrating element of recent books on economic development is that they wildly overstate. Jeffrey Sachs, in The End of Poverty, promises that we can eradicate poverty with a few simple (if not easy) steps; and William Easterly, in The White Man's Burden, tells us aid is a disaster (with some tiny caveats at the end). Collier offers the nuanced voice that has been missing. He draws on decades of his and others' careful research to explain four traps that keep most of the bottom billion in captivity and why globalization as it is currently configured will do little for these poorest nations.

He goes on to explore how each of a whole array of policy instruments (including but not limited to aid) can play a key role in helping the bottom billion get on track towards growth. He explains what kinds of aid are most likely to help post-conflict societies and corrupt societies, how the WTO could actually play a useful role in helping the poorest, how to credibly increase private investment, and where military intervention might actually work. Collier's recommendations feel the most plausible of any out there.

Collier brings credibility to the table with non-technical descriptions of many of his studies as well as anecdotes of challenging Kenya's ex-President Moi on his corrupt agricultural policies or asking Nigeria's finance minister about obstacles to reform. The research is not unassailable (for example, when he calculates the cost of a failing state), but he has spent years using the best data and methods available to get at answers to completely intractable questions: the results are at the very least worth weighing carefully.

The book has no notes except a heavily abridged list of Collier's studies at the end. Some endnotes with better references for those who would like to examine the research more carefully would improve the volume.

Despite that minor critique, this is a readable volume (under 200 pages) with some of the best analysis on economic development that I have read. Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, calls The Bottom Billion "the best book on international affairs so far this year." He's right.

[The Kristof quote is from "Africa's World War," New York Times, June 14, 2007. If I haven't convinced you to read the book, then read Niall Ferguson's review in the New York Times ("The Least Among Us," 1 July 2007) or Martin Wolf's review in the Financial Times ("How the bottom billion are trapped," 13 May 2007). Both are available on-line.]

Developing countries are quite unlike Tolstoi's characterization of happy and unhappy families. Each happy country looks different from the other, and there are vast differences between China, India, Brazil, and other developing success stories, but there is a similarity between unhappy countries--countries that are not only failing to develop, but also going downward and falling apart. Together, these countries have a combined population of about one billion people, and what happen to this bottom billion has important consequences for the whole world.

Paul Collier pioneered the burgeoning research on the economic causes of conflicts, and his work on civil wars has proved quite controversial among political science experts. Those experts tend to interpret civil wars in terms of heroic struggles motivated by grievances or ethnic strifes reflecting deeply-rooted hatreds. The author's research shows that rebel groups are usually doing well out of war, and that greed often trumps grievance as the underlying cause of conflict. He proves this by statistical analysis, showing for instance that there is basically no relationship between political repression and the risk of civil war, or between ethnic fragmentation and conflict (although ethnic polarization does play a part).

Conflict is not the only trap. The author also goes through the natural resource trap, the trap of being landlocked with bad neighbors, and the trap of bad governance in a small country. Those traps often reinforce each other, and their combined effects condemn the bottom countries to the slow lane. In each case, Paul Collier not only successfully reviews the existing literature, but also offers original insights drawn from his own research. For instance, he demonstrates that far from being immune from the resource curse, democracies may create additional risks by inducing a phenomenon of "survival of the fattest". He is, to my knowledge, the first expert to point out that diversification of resource providers away from the Middle East in the name of energy security may actually increase the risk of disruption on world markets by creating new zones of instability: "Shifting our source of supply simply will not work as a security measure if the resource curse shifts with it."

This research has direct policy relevance. By putting a price tag on the cost of a typical civil war (about 64 billion) or the gain of a sustained turnaround placing a formerly failed state on a secure path (about 100 billion), the author allows decision-makers to base their decisions on cost-benefit analysis. He shows that some interventions have a very large pay-off: the British Operation Palliser in Sierra Leone was a huge success, worth perhaps thirty times its cost. The protection offered by the French against military coups in Africa, now tempered by a hesitation to intervene, was perhaps also worthwhile. The European Union's new rapid reaction force may play a similar role in the future by offering a guarantee to democratic governments conditional upon internationally certified free and fair elections. "Making coups history" is certainly more controversial than the global rally against poverty, but may in the end contribute more to the plight of the bottom billion than the doubling of aid flows.

Indeed, the author shows that aid offers only part of the solution, and the way it is currently managed makes it in certain cases part of the problem. Rich countries and development agencies need to narrow the target by focusing more on the bottom billion, while at the same time broadening the instruments in order to consider policy tools other than aid. This process also characterizes the author's own research, which increases the focus of economic analysis by using cutting-edge statistical tools, while broadening the scope of relevant issues, in order to inform the decisions of policy makers. To give an example, people often wonder how much of Africa's wealth has fled the continent, or how much aid leaks into military spending. Paul Collier not only addresses these issues, he answers them by giving numerical estimates (respectively 38% and 11%).

The book also contributes to the broader debate on globalization. The author has little tolerance for the protest crowds of anti-globalizers who besiege international financial institutions and G8 summits. He calls them by their name: they are anti-capitalists, and they have little interest in helping poor countries benefit from the system that they are fighting against. He also challenge people who care about global poverty but are driven by slogans, images, and anger, instead of rational analysis. But he is no rosy optimist either, and he offers a sobering view on global economic integration. Although globalization has worked wonders to lift a vast portion of humanity out of poverty, it is now making things harder for latecomers, who now face formidable competitors in China or in India. In his own words: "When Mauritius escaped the traps in the 1980s it rocketed to middle-income levels; when neighboring Madagascar finally escaped the traps two decades later, there was no rocket."

The Bottom Billion therefore opens horizons across political divides. To quote from the introduction: "The left will find that approaches it has discounted, such as military interventions, trade, and encouraging growth, are critical means to the end it has long embraced. The right will find that, unlike the challenge of global poverty reduction, the problem of the bottom billion will not be fixed automatically by global growth, and that neglect now will become a security nightmare for the world of our children."