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

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It | Paul Collier | Excellent Book Should Be Read By Everyone Concerned with Poverty

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The Bottom Billion...

	The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It Paul Collier Oxford University Press, 2007 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 42 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Global poverty, Paul Collier points out, is actually falling quite rapidly for about eighty percent 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.
In The Bottom Billion, Collier contends that these fifty failed states pose the central challenge of the developing world in the twenty-first century. The book shines a much needed light on this group of small nations, largely unnoticed by the industrialized West, that 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, pointing to a set of traps that snare these countries, including civil war, a dependence on the extraction and export of natural resources, and bad governance. Standard solutions do not work against these traps, he writes; aid is often ineffective, and globalization can actually make matters worse, driving development to more stable nations. What the bottom billion need, Collier argues, is a bold new plan supported by the Group of Eight industrialized nations. If failed states are ever to be helped, the G8 will have to adopt preferential trade policies, new laws against corruption, and new international charters, and even conduct carefully calibrated military interventions.
As former director of research for the World Bank and current Director of the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University, Paul Collier has spent a lifetime working to end global poverty. In The Bottom Billion, he offers real hope for solving one of the great humanitarian crises facing the world today.

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Bottom Billion- They can be helped!

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

Paul Collier wrote this book with all the facts on the table.
He understands what he is talking about. As an African I couldn't agree more
with what he wrote. He has laid out the 4 major traps that poor countries(countries with slow growing economies) are faced with.Paul Collier states that these four traps are:

-The Conflict trap
-The Natural Resource trap
- Being Landlocked with Bad Neighbours
- and Bad Governance in a small country

He goes on to explain how poor states can be helped out of these traps.This is a great book that everyone who cares about the poor must own. It offers strong solutions that the world community must take seriously and work hard to implement. This book was well researched for. Great Book.Great work Paul Collier. I'd forever keep this book.

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Excellent Book Should Be Read By Everyone Concerned with Poverty

Collier is a serious scholar in the world of development and here he has written a very important book. Here is the basic argument - while it sucks to be poor in countries like India, India is heading for relative prosperity. Where is really, really sucks to be poor is in a number of countries, concentrated in Africa where there is little hope of breaking out of a cycle of severe poverty. Collier pinpoints four ways in which these countries stay at the bottom - (1) they are racked by civil wars; (2) they're rich in a specific natural resource which stifles economic group in other areas; (3) they are surrounded by awful neighbors; and/or (4) they are a small country which is consistently horrifically governed. Collier proposes a number of concrete steps to deal with some of these problems, steps which I find to be realistic if perhaps politically unlikely at times. For example, Collier is totally in support of military intervention, of course he thinks there is a right way and wrong way to do it, but still, you're not hearing Jeff Sachs talk about sending in guns to cure poverty and with the disaster that has been the Iraq war, I think it will be a long time before the developed world is interested in dangerous humanitarian missions.

This is the book of a man who has spent a long time in world of bureaucracies whose mandate is to fight poverty, and some of Collier's ideas are a bit gun-ho in reaction to what he rightly thinks is a lack of will power from the developed world. I don't think all of his ideas are good ones, and many of them I think are unlikely given the developed world's current lack of commitment to fighting poverty, but if you have any interest in development and poverty reduction you have to read this book.

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Thought Provoking

I really enjoyed this book. Paul Collier has taken what is a very complex issue and presented it in a concise view of the situation of the "Bottom Billion" which many of us do not really understand. Collier and his colleagues have done an enormous amount of research and analysis and have distilled that into a compelling read for anyone who worries about what's happening to our world.

To me, the book shed light on the difficulty faced by the "Bottom Billion" and how, with the best of intentions, Aid organisations, the World Bank, IMF, European Union, USA, regional bodies etc can still not achieve an improvement in the lives of these people. Coordination is the key, and that is far easier said than done - and I am just wondering how the author is working to get this "Bottom Billion" discussion tabled. It would be great to follow any progress made - and I hope, for the sake of a billion lives, there is progress.

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Will stimulate your thinking

I love books like this. I am not a development expert not involved in international business nor government. Just a average middle class guy who tries to think beyond the bounds of my little world.

Can't argue whether anything he put on these pages is wrong or right. It's engaging writing and I often found myself pausing to ponder some point Collier makes. All-in-all, a great read.

One additional note: The first chapter is very wonkish...lots of statistics and figures. It may put you off and keep you from reading further....if so just skip to Chapter 3. You can still get the gist of Collier's argument.

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Poorest billion

What do we do with them?

Prof. Collier of Oxford University, has done years of research, publishing, conferences, on this topic. Yet, one-size- fit-all solution never came up.

With civil war, ethnic conflict, fighting for natural resources, bad governance, bad neighbors, military power, aids from G8, law, trade policy issues, one would think that the solution is not possible.

What is needed is to have a strong and capable leadership at the top. With a strong leader, the country can change.

We need to focus on a group of countries at a time. G8 countries are drilling oil, gas, and minerals in Africa now. China recently sent 500,000 to Africa to build highway, bridges, telephone systems, etc.
It is possible to accomplish.

But this book does not include any of the African success stories.
Everyone knows the problem. But the solution is the most important for the bottom billions.

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