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

By Paul Collier

Book Overview

In the universally acclaimed and award-winning The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier reveals that fifty failed states--home to the poorest one billion people on Earth--pose the central challenge of the developing world in the twenty-first century. The book shines 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 nations between reformers and corrupt leaders--and the corrupt are winning. Collier analyzes the causes of failure, pointing to a set of traps that ensnare these countries, including civil war, a dependence on the extraction and export of natural resources, and bad governance. Standard solutions do not work, 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, new international charters, and even conduct carefully calibrated military interventions. 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.

"Set to become a classic. Crammed with statistical nuggets and common sense, his book should be compulsory reading."
--The Economist

"If Sachs seems too saintly and Easterly too cynical, then Collier is the authentic old Africa hand: he knows the terrain and has a keen ear.... If you've ever found yourself on one side or the other of those arguments--and who hasn't?--then you simply must read this book."
--Niall Ferguson, The New York Times Book Review

"Rich in both analysis and recommendations.... Read this book. You will learn much you do not know. It will also change the way you look at the tragedy of persistent poverty in a world of plenty."
--Financial Times

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195311450
• ISBN13: 9780195311457
• Release Date: May 2007
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.07 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Delightful and mostly intelligent

This very eloquent and mostly thoughtful book about the world's poorest countries will offend ideologues of all stripes. Collier's four different explanations for poverty traps (war, presence of natural resources, bad neighbors blocking trade routes, and corruption) clearly place him as a fox rather than a hedgehog without being complex enough that they can rationalize any result (although they can probably rationalize more...

Objectivity + Readability = Must Read

The previous reviews have done a solid job explaining the concepts. I will agree that the lack of citations is annoying, but with some unnecessary effort, you can find the citations you want from his website. This book is not only fascinating and thought-provoking, but very easy to read. Collier distills concepts that are broad, deep and complicated like few writers I have come across. He is probably an excellent teacher...

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

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...

finally, a compelling, nuanced, evidence-based treatise on how to help the very poorest

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...

Indispensable Reading

The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier is the most important book to appear in many years on the challenge of raising the world's poorest peoples, many of whom live in Africa, from persistent poverty. Although based on substantial primary research, it is a highly readable volume. It is certain to change the way many development practitioners, and concerned individuals, think about globalization and underdevelopment. Richard Joseph,...