Collier's The Bottom Billion begins with a stark fact: out of the six billion people alive in the world, about one billion live in nations that are desperately poor and likely to stay that way. Not that the rest are rich - but their countries are developing, are moving up from the bottom. What his holding back the others?

Collier combines the results of rigorous research with the sharp logic of economics to identify four "traps" into which a nation can fall - and which prevent it from moving forward. Exploring each in turn, it quickly becomes clear that falling into one of the traps makes it more likely that a nation will fall into some of the others.

This would be a pretty bleak book if it only identified the problem. Collier goes on, though, to use the same tools to explore whether and how nations can break free from the traps. Where we often asks simple questions - "Does foreign aid help?" - Collier provides complex answers - "Aid does not help right after a conflict, but makes a tremendous difference if the right kind of assistance is given two to four years later, when the new government is stable enough to make use of it."

The details of the various studies are easy to lose track of - I would need to take notes to fully retain this book - but overall, I found it interesting and compelling. Recommended. ( )

This reviewer had to read Bottom Billion through a couple of times because she found it unusually packed with knowledge. Not to mention cool-headed, analytical in high measure, and usefully lacking in political polemic which made it all the more readable.

Amid the evidence of falling poverty levels and the spread of prosperity that is happily affecting large parts of the world's population, the text focuses on the poorest sixth for whom living standards have always been wretched and have unquestionably failed to improve in the last four decades, if not worsen. Collier calls this group "Africa +" and counts 58 nations, whose combined GDP tallies up somewhere short of Belgium's, but omits to provide a list (to avoid self-fulfilling stigmatisation, apparently). The analysis of this group consists of some first-hand research and an impressive sounding effort to source and work with diverse data, for which the papers are cited at the end of the relatively short volume. (This reviewer should note that she has not chased down any of the research papers listed, and she wonders if the book would carry more authority if it brought some of the dry data analysis on board, even if it would be longer and less popular. She would still have read it anyway)

For various reasons, the bottom billion countries become ensnared in one or more of four traps: conflict, the resource-curse, odds-against geography and neighbours, and useless government. Unfortunately escaping from each of these is difficult or impossible, and reprieves are always shaky and prone to relapse. Some countries should, according to the author, never have been created as viable in the first place (though no time is wasted on wishful re-drawing of borders)--particularly landlocked ones and (counterintuitively perhaps) those which also have dominant natural resource endowments. Never mind debates about "sustainable" or "the wrong kind of" growth--for most of these countries there is none of it whatsoever to argue about. And it is not a simple case of failure to be integrated with the global capital or skills markets--many bottom billion nations are integrated, but the wrong way; scarce domestic capital leaks abroad, as do the sparse scattering of educated individuals with productive potential. The picture becomes depressingly akin to a "somewhere has to be bottom" scenario, in which mobility of capital and skills will just exacerbate the differences. In another cruel twist, Collier points to the likelihood that the bottom billion have missed the boat: with India, China and much of Asia having managed to escape stagnation since 1970 or thereabouts, the door is nowhere near as wide open for anyone else, and won't be until Asia has perhaps fully caught up with the rich world. (One of the surprising policy recommendations following from this is for relatively protectionist trade against Asia--though brought about by lowering mutual barriers with bottom billion partners without doing the same with Asia)

As far as solutions are concerned, some of the limits and the negative effects of foreign aid were familiar to this reviewer; but other policy misfirings were new to her. Aid can easily be spent as badly as oil revenues and can crowd out other earners of foreign exchange just the same, and conditionality--not being a simultaneous exchange--frequently doesn't get traction. Sudden market liberalisation isn't great either since patronage often dominates and occludes the price system. And instant democracy--in the form of competitive elections--can easily be a public bad too, lacking the checks and balances of governance which take time, or certainly more care, to install. Military intervention in conflict and post conflict situations is recommended rather sparingly and more for the latter circumstance, since one civil war tends to be a predictor of the next. The author laments the extreme unlikelihood of another intervention any time soon post Iraq, anyway, also pointing to how badly past cycles of public support/hostility to such campaigns have actually served the afflicted, not least because of overly hubristic approaches from the rich west (America basically) at the wrong times (Somalia, Iraq) leading to a collapse in political will the next time (Rwanda, now).

This reviewer has yet to find a mainstream economics writer who fails to point out that protectionist trade policy is the rich world's biggest wrongdoing (often born of a "headless heart") and she is not disappointed this time either. She is also happy to re-encounter sensiblilities regarding the overwhelming positives of policies that end up being pro-growth. Collier's more unique addition to the standard solutions--which is what she finds most interesting and explains the high rating she gives this book--is the case for the formation of international charters for handling resource FX, implementing democracy, peacekeeping post-conflicts, and encouraging and stewarding foreign capital. These would be good not because of legally-binding force (which they wouldn't really have--"world government" is sensibly recognised as the stuff of pipe-dreams), but through the establishment of global societal norms which could demonstrate benefits and shape improvements and thus show up incentives for compliance more visibly than anything tried so far. Such global public goods would even be relatively cheap to set up (compared to--say--a military intervention or a "doubling of aid"). Alas, their undersupply is nonetheless still a public goods problem, which requires more tools than the ideas themselves to solve. The author calls out to the G8 as the best hope for international charters, though this reviewer noted some mention of the 2007 get-together in Germany as a hopeful event in this regard, and she doesn't think the idea has caught on yet. What a pity.

Francesca ( )

The bottom billion are Africa, Afghanistan, and any nation so bereft it lacks governance and economic development for its people. Caused by four traps: natural resources, repeated civil conflict, landlockedness, bad governance combined with smallness. Remedies: targeted aid for development infrastructure, trade policies for development, military intervention against coups, codes of ethics for businesses and countries dealing with kleptocracies.
Value to me has been to add complexity to an overly simplified discussion of Africa's many problems. The book is a set of views derived from economic data analysis aimed at teasing out causal arrows: does civil war cause poverty or does poverty cause civil war, eg. Causal conclusions and policy recommendations are thought-provoking, even if flawed. A great discussion opener.
Scathing criticism of aid organizations and old, jaded ways of framing Africa, a door opener to re-thinking a complex of situations with a more sophisticated complex of solutions.

I have decayed into a skimming/sampling mode at the moment, but overall I have found Collier impressive. I never know quite what to make about arguments sustained by regression models across multiple societies over a limited (50 year) period -- can we trust these correlations, or are they artifacts of a specific set of circumstances? Can culture really be so neatly excised from the account? This is a quibble, however, with an excellent and thoughtful book. Anyone who wants to understand the disaster in which a fifth of the world finds itself should read it. ( )

I had high hopes for The Bottom Billion. It seemed like it would be an interesting discussion of what to do about poverty in the worst economies on the planet. In fact, I think Collier has some good things to say about the subject. Unfortunately, he didn't do such a good job of saying them here.

My biggest complaint about the book is that it presents ideas without a shred of work to discuss the ideas. What's sad is that he did the work to back up his ideas, and he tells the reader frequently that he did the work. But the nature of a book like this requires the author do more than just tell us about his results. It should let the reader evaluate whether we believe the arguments, and that just isn't possible here. In fact, he didn't include footnotes or endnotes to reference specific works in favor of a bibliography at the end with relatively few detailsto point to a specific paper for a specific issue. The average reader will not have the resources to track down all the papers discussed.

The book could have been really good. It's only 192 pages long, and Collier could easily have doubled the length and put in details of the work behind his discussion. Instead, it just felt like he wanted to throw off a quick book without too much work. If he was concerned about getting bogged down in details, he could easily have used a two-track system where the first half of each chapter is the published material and the second half of each chapter is the detail. Then readers not so interested in the details could just skip over the second track material. ( )