The Most Over-Rated Book of the Century (so far)?

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	• 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 37 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

"narrow the target, broaden the instruments"

All societies were once poor, says the Oxford economist Paul Collier, but now most countries are either wealthy or at least lifting themselves out of poverty. In his view, about a billion people in the developed world are wealthy, and about four billion people live in countries that are, in fact, experiencing significant economic growth (cf. China and India). His book focuses on the one billion people badly stuck at the very bottom who live in countries that are not only horribly poor but not growing. These sixty countries are not merely "falling behind, they are falling apart." About 70% of these countries are in Africa, and, unlike the middle four billion people, they are poorer today than they were in 1970. "Picture this," writes Collier, "as a billion people stuck in a train that is slowly rolling backward downhill."

How and why has this happened? Collier and his colleagues identify "four distinct traps" that plague the bottom billion. They experience a disproportionate amount of conflict in civil wars and coups ("development in reverse"). They're caught in a natural resources paradox where what looks like a blessing (the presence of a significant natural resource) turns out to be a curse, because the natural resource tends to slow economic growth, inhibit diversification, and encourage autocracy. To some extent geography dictates economics; the bottom billion live in countries that are landlocked with bad neighbors, which means that transport corridors and nearby markets are bad or non-existent. Finally, and Collier is unsparing on this point, these countries experience horrible governance, massive corruption and breath-taking incompetence. In an interlude chapter he explains how and why globalization hasn't helped these countries like it has the middle four billion people-- trade problems, the lack of private capital flowing into the countries, and the flow of human and private financial capital out of the country.

Collier is a realist but not a pessimist. He views these problems as "serious but fixable." These countries must rescue themselves, but they can't and won't do it without help from the outside. There are powerful forces that resist change. In the last half of the book Collier explains how four policy instruments can make a difference. Aid to these countries is highly politicized, bureaucratized, and badly abused; it has severe problems and limitations, but it's still necessary. Second, Collier explains how military intervention can restore order, maintain peace, and prevent coups. In a chapter on laws and charters he argues for wealthy countries to change their own laws in ways to favor the bottom billion, and for international norms. The fourth instrument is better trade policy.

Collier wants to move beyond the left, exemplified in Jeffrey Sachs' book The End of Poverty that argues that more aid is the answer, and the right, exemplified in The White Man's Burden by William Easterly that suggests that more aid is the problem. We need a new sort of thinking that grapples with what he calls "three central proposition." First, we now face a development problem that is different than what we've had over the last forty years--not the one billion rich and the five billion poor, but the one billion people stuck at the very bottom. Second, this is not a contest between rich nations romanticizing poverty out of white guilt, but rather a titantic struggle within the bottom billion countries between genuine heroes who are working for change and powerful forces determined to preserve the status quo. Third, "we do not need to be bystanders. Our support for change can be decisive." In sum, Collier argues that we need to "narrow the target and broaden the instruments."

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Plausible, but . . .

Economic growth is a complicated business. Too many people focus on single issues, as though you just have to flip a switch to create wealth. You won't find any single-factor-theories here! No sir, this is my new, improved, patented, unique, four-factor theory! Step right up folks, it won't last long!

Cheap sarcasm aside, four is better than one. The four factors Collier alludes to are conflict, resources, geography and governance. A fairly standard list, but he is more careful and nuanced than most in analysing what really matters in each case and the interactions between them. Briefly:

1. Conflict (both civil war and coups): while low income and growth and dependence on primary exports are good predictors, inequality and repression are not. Ethnic diversity can be a problem, but only in the particular case where there is a clear majority group but still significant minorities. Highly diverse countries are therefore as well off as homogenous ones. There is no special "Africa effect" once other factors are accounted for. In one study from Nigeria, fighters tend to be young, uneducated and with no dependents. Having a sense of grievance does not matter. Conflict areas tend to be those with few oil wells (rather than none or many), with no relationship with the level of government services in the region. Most ominously, there does appear to be a trap: once conflict happens once, it makes future conflict more likely.

2. Resources: The resource curse does operate, through the standard channels of Dutch disease, volatility, and kleptocracy. But it is dependent on bad governance. If a country has a working democracy with checks and balances before resource wealth is discovered, there is no problem. But if these institutions do not exist, things get worse.

3. Geography: It matters - being landlocked is bad - but again this is not a homogeneous effect. It depends on having bad neighbors: too poor to be good markets themselves, and with expensive and unreliable transport to the rest of the world. Thus central Africa and Asia are in trouble, while Switzerland prospers.

4. Governance: bad governance seems to be a problem mostly when other things go wrong, and seems to be easier to fix right after a war. A larger, more educated population also helps. Sadly, democracy is no guarantee.

When it comes to help, aid is better for growth than oil. All those expensive bureaucracies apparently do some good in screening out the very worst projects. Collier also emphasises the crucial elements of timing after a crisis: technical assistance first, then cash.

All of this sounds nice and reasonable, but so did a lot of things that turned out to be nonsense. The great flaw of this book is the lack of references. There is literally no bibliography. The only link to more information is Collier's website, and a list of his papers (without links). It is hugely arrogant to proclaim that "my image smasher is statistical evidence", write a book without any references to other's work, and then expect people to take all of your work on faith.

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The Most Over-Rated Book of the Century (so far)?

This is a well written and well meaning book of second rate political theory, supported by questionable statistical analysis, full of factual and logical errors and prone to exaggeration. Because of its flowing style, most readers have presumably glided along the text without pausing to think about facts and logic.

The author deliberately personalizes his text, which unfortunately makes any critique appear personal. Collier no doubt means well, but he vastly over-reaches in his attempt to do good. The result is an unforgivable flexibility with facts and logic. On the first page of the Preface he recounts his ca. 1971/72 resolve to go to Malawi, "the poorest country on the continent". Not quite: In 1971/72 the poorest countries were Burundi and Rwanda, while Malawi tied with Mali for third place. The text should read "Malawi..one of the poorest countries on the continent". But to state the fact would not have the same literary impact as some flexibility with the truth. Unfortunately, this approach continues throughout the book.

Take the second sentence of Chapter 1: "For forty years the development challenge has been a rich world of one billion people facing a poor world of five billion people." This is nonsense - it says that for the past forty years world population has been six billion! Collier is referring to proportions (rich 16.6%, poor 83.4%). Sloppy editing? Yes. Forgivable in a book by a distinguished academic that has garnered so much praise? No way!

A small sample of other errors: Pg. 42 "New discoveries [of oil] have been made in...Gambia, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal and East Timor.": no oil has ever been found in Gambia or Senegal, and results of the only well offshore of Sao Tome are not known. Pg. 50: Botswana is "resource-rich, ethnically diverse": Botswana is very non-diverse by African standards (79% of people belong to the Tswana tribe, while 72% are Christian). Pg. 145 "Brent Spar was an oil well in the North Sea.": It was an oil storage and tanker loading buoy. One could go on in this vein.

The book's problems go well beyond sloppy factual errors. Its basis lies in the peer-reviewed academic papers of Collier and his collaborators. This esoteric statistical analysis yields such absurd conclusions as "a typical low-income country faces a risk of civil war of about 14% in any five-year period. Each percentage point added to the growth rate knocks off a percentage point from this risk"(Pg. 20). Sounds very neat until you realize that: (a) there is no such thing as the "typical low-income country" (they are as diverse as Nepal and Nigeria), hence this says nothing useful about any particular country, and (b) "measuring" civil wars for statistical purposes is almost impossible (e.g. how many people really died? Think of Iraq today...). What we are left with are the obvious assertions that in general poor countries have more civil wars than rich ones, and if a country is doing well economically it is less likely to have a civil war. We don't need multivariate statistics to know this.

Finally, there are Collier's well meaning policy prescriptions. These center around global standards for good conduct and punishment for those who disobey. This is bracing idealistic stuff, but about as practical in this multi-polar world of Chinese expansion, US dysfunction and European impotence as calls for global revolution. Come to think of it, Collier has not strayed as far as he would have us believe from the wide-eyed idealism of the Oxford Revolutionary Socialist Students, whose ranks he joined in 1968 (Preface).

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Very Interesting

Recommend this book to anyone who ponders the fate of the poorest countries of the world. Some very interesting theories and anecdotes about how they came to be that way.
All well argued and easy to read for the layman.
And 50% cheaper via Amazon compared to ordering it via my local bookstore !

Hard-hitting indictment of development's failure

getAbstract finds that this concise, clearly written and hard-hitting book by Paul Collier, one of the world's leading experts on Africa, is a must-read for anyone concerned with development, economic justice, trade, immigration, terrorism and related issues. The author has scant patience with sacred cows of either the right or the left. He penetrates the fictions and fantasies that have helped drive not only unproductive but actually counterproductive policies on aid, trade, investment and more. The book is enlightening, and entertaining in the way that good satire is entertaining. It is also inspiring, since Collier goes beyond merely identifying problems: He offers credible suggestions for solutions.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

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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