The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can be Done About It / Paul Collier [book review]

Abstract

Collier is an economist and certainly no missiologist. However, like Dowden’s text, this provides some impressive and potentially useful background understanding for anyone working among people belonging to the countries of the ‘bottom billion.’ These countries are those who are not growing economically and have no immediate prospect of significant economic growth. It is no longer a matter of a billion rich people facing a poor world of 5 billion. Now, around 5 billion live in countries that are developing, “often at amazing speed.” The other billion is “falling behind and often falling apart” (3). Collier’s analyzes why the poorest countries are failing. There are four traps into which countries in the ‘bb’ are prone to be caught. The operative word is trap since the great difficulty is getting out, since the effect is cyclical and, to make matters worse, one trap can easily lead to another. The cost to the country, its neighbors, and the global economy of countries caught in these traps is enormous. The four traps are: (1) the conflict trap (civil war, coups); (2) the natural resource trap; (3) landlocked with bad neighbors; and (4) bad governance in a small country. All of the ‘bb’ countries have been in one or another trap: 73% have endured civil war; 29% are dominated by politics of natural resource revenues; 30% are landlocked, resource-scarce, and have bad neighbors; 76% have been through a period of bad governance and poor economic policies (79). Paul Collier The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can be Done About It New York; Oxford University Press, 2007 $15.95