Collier, Paul. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.

• Author: Quest, Linda G.
• Position: Book review

Collier, Paul. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. xiii + 205 pages. Cloth, $28.

Complex issues of development, poverty, and development-resistant poverty have never been elucidated so readably. Economist Paul Collier deftly integrates and then enhances the foremost theorizing, reporting, and publications on poverty. He hypothesizes massive and accelerating divergence between "Prosperia" (the developed and the developing five billion) and "Catastrophia" (the bottom billion) (pp. 8-12). Catastrophia is in the process of falling behind and falling apart (p. 10). A dismal and possible scenario is "a vast running sore--a billion people stuck in desperate conditions alongside unprecedented prosperity" (p. 193). This is a linear projection from presently visible trends unless alternatives readily imaginable are pursued in the near future. That would provide a better scenario based on convergence--slowly achieved, perhaps over a fifteen to twenty-five year time frame--that raises the bottom substantially. Collier leaves the reader with provocative questions: (1) Can I vote so as to elect officials who will ameliorate trade policy with bottom-billion and near-bottom states, ratify meaningful laws and charters to prioritize good government, and nudge G8 representatives toward prudent and effective commitments? (2) Can I personally utilize networks and connections to improve neighborhoods where bottom-billion states are located? (3) Can I directly assist persons in bottom-billion states with remittances cognizant that NGOs are typically unable to get volunteers for the bottom-most quintile?

Collier identifies fifty-eight countries that fall into the bottom-billion group (p. 7) and warns against aggregating them as all-of-a-kind, although they have smallness in common. He is explicit and coherent about the traps and combinations of traps in which they are caught--conflicts that stem from poverty and that impoverish them further, windfalls of natural resources that make other industries comparatively negligible (Dutch disease), landlocked geography with bad neighbors (sometimes reformable), and bad government in a small country (corruption and cronyism out of all proportion to minuscule size). Collier avoids damaging forecasts or self-fulfilling prophecies (pp. 7, 19). Instead, he provides examples of countries that have missed the boat. These are preeminently...