This reviewer had to read Bottom Billion through a couple of times because she found it unusually packed with knowledge. Not to mention cool-headed, analytical in high measure, and usefully lacking in political polemic which made it all the more readable.
Amid the evidence of falling poverty levels and the spread of prosperity that is happily affecting large parts of the world's population, the text focuses on the poorest sixth for whom living standards have always been wretched and have unquestionably failed to improve in the last four decades, if not worsen. Collier calls this group "Africa +" and counts 58 nations, whose combined GDP tallies up somewhere short of Belgium's, but omits to provide a list (to avoid self-fulfilling stigmatisation, apparently). The analysis of this group consists of some first-hand research and an impressive sounding effort to source and work with diverse data, for which the papers are cited at the end of the relatively short volume. (This reviewer should note that she has not chased down any of the research papers listed, and she wonders if the book would carry more authority if it brought some of the dry data analysis on board, even if it would be longer and less popular. She would still have read it anyway)
For various reasons, the bottom billion countries become ensnared in one or more of four traps: conflict, the resource-curse, odds-against geography and neighbours, and useless government. Unfortunately escaping from each of these is difficult or impossible, and reprieves are always shaky and prone to relapse. Some countries should, according to the author, never have been created as viable in the first place (though no time is wasted on wishful re-drawing of borders)--particularly landlocked ones and (counterintuitively perhaps) those which also have dominant natural resource endowments. Never mind debates about "sustainable" or "the wrong kind of" growth--for most of these countries there is none of it whatsoever to argue about. And it is not a simple case of failure to be integrated with the global capital or skills markets--many bottom billion nations are integrated, but the wrong way; scarce domestic capital leaks abroad, as do the sparse scattering of educated individuals with productive potential. The picture becomes depressingly akin to a "somewhere has to be bottom" scenario, in which mobility of capital and skills will just exacerbate the differences. In another cruel twist, Collier points to the likelihood that the bottom billion have missed the boat: with India, China and much of Asia having managed to escape stagnation since 1970 or thereabouts, the door is nowhere near as wide open for anyone else, and won't be until Asia has perhaps fully caught up with the rich world. (One of the surprising policy recommendations following from this is for relatively protectionist trade against Asia--though brought about by lowering mutual barriers with bottom billion partners without doing the same with Asia)
As far as solutions are concerned, some of the limits and the negative effects of foreign aid were familiar to this reviewer; but other policy misfirings were new to her. Aid can easily be spent as badly as oil revenues and can crowd out other earners of foreign exchange just the same, and conditionality--not being a simultaneous exchange--frequently doesn't get traction. Sudden market liberalisation isn't great either since patronage often dominates and occludes the price system. And instant democracy--in the form of competitive elections--can easily be a public bad too, lacking the checks and balances of governance which take time, or certainly more care, to install. Military intervention in conflict and post conflict situations is recommended rather sparingly and more for the latter circumstance, since one civil war tends to be a predictor of the next. The author laments the extreme unlikelihood of another intervention any time soon post Iraq, anyway, also pointing to how badly past cycles of public support/hostility to such campaigns have actually served the afflicted, not least because of overly hubristic approaches from the rich west (America basically) at the wrong times (Somalia, Iraq) leading to a collapse in political will the next time (Rwanda, now).
This reviewer has yet to find a mainstream economics writer who fails to point out that protectionist trade policy is the rich world's biggest wrongdoing (often born of a "headless heart") and she is not disappointed this time either. She is also happy to re-encounter sensiblilities regarding the overwhelming positives of policies that end up being pro-growth. Collier's more unique addition to the standard solutions--which is what she finds most interesting and explains the high rating she gives this book--is the case for the formation of international charters for handling resource FX, implementing democracy, peacekeeping post-conflicts, and encouraging and stewarding foreign capital. These would be good not because of legally-binding force (which they wouldn't really have--"world government" is sensibly recognised as the stuff of pipe-dreams), but through the establishment of global societal norms which could demonstrate benefits and shape improvements and thus show up incentives for compliance more visibly than anything tried so far. Such global public goods would even be relatively cheap to set up (compared to--say--a military intervention or a "doubling of aid"). Alas, their undersupply is nonetheless still a public goods problem, which requires more tools than the ideas themselves to solve. The author calls out to the G8 as the best hope for international charters, though this reviewer noted some mention of the 2007 get-together in Germany as a hopeful event in this regard, and she doesn't think the idea has caught on yet. What a pity.
