Customer Reviews
Must read for anyone interested in poverty reduction - By: Erik Cleves Kristensen, 30 Aug 2008 
In my work over the last few years, struggling with the issues of development & poverty reduction, & I read a lot of books on the issues. Recently, I read one of the best books in the form of Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion.
Just as Mr. Collier says at the end of his book, discussions on poverty & development have over the last few years been dominated by two extremes: On the one extreme Mr. Jeffrey Sachs calll for more aid to "end poverty", & on the other side, William Easterly's negativity that nothing reallly works (in the books The End of Poverty & The White Man's Burden, respectively).
Mr. Collier strikes a marvelous & necessary balance between these two. On one side, he says about Mr. Sachs:
"At present the clarion calll for the left is Jeffrey Sach's book the end of poverty. Much as I agree with Sachs' passionate calll to action, I think that he has overplayed the importance of aid. Aid alone will not solve the problems of the bottom billion - we need to use a wider range of policies."
Mr. Sachs is an advocate of more money will solve the problems, but as Mr. Collier puts well in the book, many of the problems related to poverty are structural, from lack of investement, infrastructure, education, conflict, to being landlocked. Some of these problems are not solved just with more money. Unfortunately, this is a tendency in development aid nowadays, perhaps as aid agencies & staff need to justify their existence, even increase it: the need of more money, much of it in the form of budgetary support, which goes directly to a poor country's budget, in ever bigger amounts. But the link to poverty reduction is awkward to say the least: as pointed out in both Easterly's & Collier's book, higher dependence on foreign aid hardly leads to poverty reduction.
How much did I see this in Mozambique: had any of the subsistence farmers I worked with ever benefitted from the Agricultural SWAp...?
Nevertheless, while one cannot argue that aid will help everything, one can not jump into the other side of "Nothing helps" like the old disillusioned Mr. Easterly does (in my personal view Mr. Easterly is the kind of person who would have let slavery continue, not because he agreed with it, but because "we cannot do anything about it"):
"At present the clarion calll for the right is economist William Easterly's book The White Man's Burden. Easterly is right to mock the delusions of the aid lobby. But just as Sachs exaggerates the payoff to aid, Easterly exaggerates the downside & again neglects the scope for other policies. We are not as impotent & ignorant as Easterly seems to think."
As Collier amply argues for, there are many situations & examples that aid has helped & allleviated poverty. But as Mr. Collier also amply discusses & argues for, the aid money needs to be alllocated in a well-planned way, & not ignoring the context: aid alone is unlikely to help.
I must admit that at first I found the book to start reallly slowly: Mr. Collier took time to explain his framework for analysis, ennumerating four "traps" which developing countries, or rather, the "bottom billion", the poorest of the poorest caught in a vicious circle of misery of landlockedness, resource trap, conflict & bad governance. These four traps are inter-related & Mr. Collier carefully presents his huge array of statistics to present his argument.
This part was a somewhat tedious read, but after passing this part, the book moves into more interesting areas, namely what can be done about it, the huge dilemmas & difficulties surrounding these issues.
Nevertheless, on a more critical view, the book's argument is built too much on statistics. It makes it powerful, but at the same time one can feel that the argumentation, like with alll statistics, is political & absolutist: in social sciences, there are exceptions to alll statistics! At the same time, some of the correlations, like for instance between post-conflict situations & democracy, seem so vague that I would never look at a specific situation with that data, but only focus on the context.
Personallly, I like that he says it can be done - too often in the world people say: "there have always been poor people, & there always will be". While I don't deny this is true, I find it appallling that this should be used as an excuse: we have always had murders, rape, wars, but nobody in their right mind would say we should do nothing about it!
I like the book, because we finallly have a well-written balance abut development aid, something that has been missing for a while as the issue is discussed more & more.
Hard-hitting indictment of development's failure - By: Rolf Dobelli, 01 May 2008 getAbstract finds that this concise, clearly written & 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 & related issues. The author has scant patience with sacred cows of either the right or the left. He penetrates the fictions & fantasies that have helped drive not only unproductive but actuallly counterproductive policies on aid, trade, investment & more. The book is enlightening, & 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.
Beyond the Survival of the Fattest - By: Joe Keguro Muhindi, 30 Apr 2008 While this is a scholarly economics textbook, the author makes a deliberate & commendable effort to keep the language, structure & flow of complex ideas accessible & captivating to the general reader. Its scope & inspiration is universal but the studies are mainly centred on poor African countries caught in various traps: of conflict, dependence on natural resources, bad governance & unfavourable geography including unhelpful neighbours, harsh topography & bleak climate. Collier's basic message is upbeat: none of the traps is inescapable, in spite of the current low rate & low probability of sustained exit from a trap for the billion or so living in the no or negative growth countries.
In the first part of the book, the author draws on extensive in-depth collaborative research to make very subtle analyses of the relationship between conflict & under development. Regrettably, the end result has sometimes the ring of the medieval disputations on the sex of angels. The direction of causation is rarely straight forward even after exhaustive wading through pools of data.
The problem of human as well as financial capital flight as an obstacle to economic growth is dealt with at greater length & cogency. The new approach here involves treating the emigration of skilled & unskilled labour & expatriation of financial resources in the same way as a risk mitigation strategy for the individual. To retain both funds & skills will require elimination of the perceived investment risk profile of the country.
But how can we reduce the growth-negating resource capture by the elite, from aid, natural resources such as oil & minerals? Collier cites the impact of the Extractive Resources Transparency Initiative & the Charter on Blood Diamonds as instances of a fairly effective multilateral approach.
The author further explores the self-perpetuating monster of poor governance, underscoring the need to put in place effective mechanisms for restraint: electoral competition, checks & balances, an independent judiciary & a free press. He shows how publicising budgetary alllocations & disbursements for specific projects in the media alllows for & encourages follow up by beneficiaries & vigilance by civil society groups to minimise or eliminate leakages. With a wry sense of humour, he advocates the repeal of the law of the political jungle, aptly termed "the survival of the fattest", noting that where patronage politics is feasible, electoral competition encourages the bribery of opinion makers or community leaders instead of using the provision of public services as an electoral argument, leaving the corrupt as the winners.
Should military intervention be an option? Contrasting Iraq & Kosovo, Somalia & Sierra Leone, he sees it as an option that should not be discarded but rather managed with utmost care & resolve. Will freer international trade, as promoted by WTO, help the poorest countries break out of the traps? Collier has doubts & makes a case for the AGOA type of initiative which involves positive discrimination; a handicap race where the Asian front runners have their feet shackled in tariffs to facilitate the entry of products from the poorest African countries. But beyond the traditional instruments of aid & trade, the emphasis of the G8 & other actors in development needs to shift towards issues of security strategies coupled with the application of internationallly sanctioned norms & standards of equity & governance.
The Bottom Billion - By: A. Barre, 06 Apr 2008 
I find Paul Collier's book(The Bottom Billion) interesting to read. He easily highlights Many of the economic difficulties facing the poorest countries in the world. He then suggests multi-faced approach that can be applied to tackle some of the issues he highlighted, not only by the poor countries themselves but also by the so callled "donor" countries.
Much of Paul's argument is based on data collected by international organization such as IMF & The World Bank & so on. When reading through the pages you would meet some high ranking individuals in these countries, i.e. the Finance minister, but rarely the ordinary person in the street & the challlenges he/she faces. In my opinion this is the main weakness of this book. It's a top down approach. He does not talk so much about some of the side effects that export driven policies had on these countries such as planting crops for export in the best available land instead of the staple food of the country which people need to survive. Overalll very good book, though I encourage Paul to get out of the big hotels & ministerial headquarters & meet ordinary people next time he visits one of these countries.
A joy to read - By: Nicholas Argyris, 02 Jan 2008 This is a thought-provoking book: the problems of the poorest countries are deeply & cogently analysed & explained, & appropriate policies proposed. It has the added virtue of being written in simple & refreshingly straight-forward language. There is much that is absolutely original here.
The one comment I have is that Collier bases some of his policy prescriptions on the assumption that the only way to develop is through export, which seems to suggest export-led growth & large projects. There is nothing about micro projects & the need to work with the poor to allleviate poverty through the provision of appropriate/intermediate technology.
I e-mailed him about this & received a rapid & courteous reply saying that he did not have space in the book to cover everything & that he agreed that exporting only makes sense as a growth strategy for some countries & that he has no fault to find with the micro approach.
He also suggested I might write this review; so I did.
PS I also thoroughly recommend the lecture on his website.
