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 globalpoverty. In The Bottom Billion, he
offers real hope for solving one of the great humanitarian crises facing the world today.
Table of Contents
Part I: What's the Issue?
A Personal Preface
1. Falling Behind and Falling Apart: The Bottom Billion
Part II: The Traps
2. The Conflict Trap
3. The Natural Resource Trap
4. Landlocked with Bad Neighbors
5. Bad Governance in a Small Country
Part III: An Interlude: Globalization to the Rescue
6. On Missing the Boat: The Marginalization of the Bottom Billion in the World Economy
Part IV: The Instruments
7. Aid to the Rescue?
8. Military Intervention
9. Laws and Charters
10. Trade
Part V: The Struggle for the Bottom Billion
11. An Agenda for Action
Postscript
Research on Which This Book Is Based