The Bottom Billion

The recent coup d'état in Niger made me think of a book I read a little while ago, The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier. In this book Collier, an Oxford economist and former Development Research director at the World Bank, looks at the countries who are trapped in severe poverty and seem unable to lift themselves out of it. He says that there are roughly fifty of these "failing states" with a combined population of approximately one billion people, hence the book's title. His thesis is that this is a radically different (but no less tragic) situation from the one we grew up with where there were approximately one billion rich people and the rest of the world was poor; there is still a wealth gap but many countries that were once grindingly poor (he gives the example of Bangladesh) are slowly getting richer. Collier goes on to describe four 'traps' which have prevented bottom billion countries from getting on the gravy train of global economic development: the conflict trap; the natural resource trap; the trap of being a land-locked nation with bad neighbours; and the trap of bad governance in a small country. This is the third coup in Niger since 1993, the country has large uranium reserves and is entirely landlocked with neighbours who range from the despotic - Libya and Algeria - to the destitute - Mali and Burkina Faso - to the downright catastrophic - Chad. I don't know much about its political institutions so cannot comment on whether it is a victim of the fourth of Collier's traps but three out of four would seem to be enough to condemn Niger to a future of misery. Collier's book is not all doom and gloom though and the final sections are devoted to examining what can be done to improve the situation. Some of his solutions are controversial: sending troops from the developed world into post-conflict countries and leaving them there for a long time. Others are not very sexy: heavy investment in infrastructure. And others are counter-intuitive: democratic elections which we tend to see as an absolute good can actually harm resource rich countries since the ruling clan will squander vast amounts of money on winning/rigging/buying the elections and will tend to ignore necessary long-term investments. Though at times I found myself disagreeing with Collier (sometimes he seems to enjoy taking deliberately provocative positions) I would nevertheless strongly recommend this book.