|
|
Whistle Stopper - The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
|
List Price: $28.00
Our Price: $15.77
Your Save: $ 12.23 ( 44% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press
|
Average Customer Rating:  
|
|
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.90091724
EAN: 9780195311457
ISBN: 0195311450
Label: Oxford University Press
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: 2007-04-27
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Studio: Oxford University Press
|
|
|
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: Hard-hitting indictment of development's failure
Comment: getAbstract finds that this concise, clearly written and 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 and related issues. The author has scant patience with sacred cows of either the right or the left. He penetrates the fictions and fantasies that have helped drive not only unproductive but actually counterproductive policies on aid, trade, investment and more. The book is enlightening, and 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.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: The Most Over-Rated Book of the Century (so far)?
Comment: This is a well written and well meaning book of second rate political theory, supported by questionable statistical analysis, full of factual and logical errors and prone to exaggeration. Because of its flowing style, most readers have presumably glided along the text without pausing to think about facts and logic.
The author deliberately personalizes his text, which unfortunately makes any critique appear personal. Collier no doubt means well, but he vastly over-reaches in his attempt to do good. The result is an unforgivable flexibility with facts and logic. On the first page of the Preface he recounts his ca. 1971/72 resolve to go to Malawi, "the poorest country on the continent". Not quite: In 1971/72 the poorest countries were Burundi and Rwanda, while Malawi tied with Mali for third place. The text should read "Malawi..one of the poorest countries on the continent". But to state the fact would not have the same literary impact as some flexibility with the truth. Unfortunately, this approach continues throughout the book.
Take the second sentence of Chapter 1: "For forty years the development challenge has been a rich world of one billion people facing a poor world of five billion people." This is nonsense - it says that for the past forty years world population has been six billion! Collier is referring to proportions (rich 16.6%, poor 83.4%). Sloppy editing? Yes. Forgivable in a book by a distinguished academic that has garnered so much praise? No way!
A small sample of other errors: Pg. 42 "New discoveries [of oil] have been made in...Gambia, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal and East Timor.": no oil has ever been found in Gambia or Senegal, and results of the only well offshore of Sao Tome are not known. Pg. 50: Botswana is "resource-rich, ethnically diverse": Botswana is very non-diverse by African standards (79% of people belong to the Tswana tribe, while 72% are Christian). Pg. 145 "Brent Spar was an oil well in the North Sea.": It was an oil storage and tanker loading buoy. One could go on in this vein.
The book's problems go well beyond sloppy factual errors. Its basis lies in the peer-reviewed academic papers of Collier and his collaborators. This esoteric statistical analysis yields such absurd conclusions as "a typical low-income country faces a risk of civil war of about 14% in any five-year period. Each percentage point added to the growth rate knocks off a percentage point from this risk"(Pg. 20). Sounds very neat until you realize that: (a) there is no such thing as the "typical low-income country" (they are as diverse as Nepal and Nigeria), hence this says nothing useful about any particular country, and (b) "measuring" civil wars for statistical purposes is almost impossible (e.g. how many people really died? Think of Iraq today...). What we are left with are the obvious assertions that in general poor countries have more civil wars than rich ones, and if a country is doing well economically it is less likely to have a civil war. We don't need multivariate statistics to know this.
Finally, there are Collier's well meaning policy prescriptions. These center around global standards for good conduct and punishment for those who disobey. This is bracing idealistic stuff, but about as practical in this multi-polar world of Chinese expansion, US dysfunction and European impotence as calls for global revolution. Come to think of it, Collier has not strayed as far as he would have us believe from the wide-eyed idealism of the Oxford Revolutionary Socialist Students, whose ranks he joined in 1968 (Preface).
Customer Rating:
Summary: "narrow the target, broaden the instruments"
Comment: All societies were once poor, says the Oxford economist Paul Collier, but now most countries are either wealthy or at least lifting themselves out of poverty. In his view, about a billion people in the developed world are wealthy, and about four billion people live in countries that are, in fact, experiencing significant economic growth (cf. China and India). His book focuses on the one billion people badly stuck at the very bottom who live in countries that are not only horribly poor but not growing. These sixty countries are not merely "falling behind, they are falling apart." About 70% of these countries are in Africa, and, unlike the middle four billion people, they are poorer today than they were in 1970. "Picture this," writes Collier, "as a billion people stuck in a train that is slowly rolling backward downhill."
How and why has this happened? Collier and his colleagues identify "four distinct traps" that plague the bottom billion. They experience a disproportionate amount of conflict in civil wars and coups ("development in reverse"). They're caught in a natural resources paradox where what looks like a blessing (the presence of a significant natural resource) turns out to be a curse, because the natural resource tends to slow economic growth, inhibit diversification, and encourage autocracy. To some extent geography dictates economics; the bottom billion live in countries that are landlocked with bad neighbors, which means that transport corridors and nearby markets are bad or non-existent. Finally, and Collier is unsparing on this point, these countries experience horrible governance, massive corruption and breath-taking incompetence. In an interlude chapter he explains how and why globalization hasn't helped these countries like it has the middle four billion people-- trade problems, the lack of private capital flowing into the countries, and the flow of human and private financial capital out of the country.
Collier is a realist but not a pessimist. He views these problems as "serious but fixable." These countries must rescue themselves, but they can't and won't do it without help from the outside. There are powerful forces that resist change. In the last half of the book Collier explains how four policy instruments can make a difference. Aid to these countries is highly politicized, bureaucratized, and badly abused; it has severe problems and limitations, but it's still necessary. Second, Collier explains how military intervention can restore order, maintain peace, and prevent coups. In a chapter on laws and charters he argues for wealthy countries to change their own laws in ways to favor the bottom billion, and for international norms. The fourth instrument is better trade policy.
Collier wants to move beyond the left, exemplified in Jeffrey Sachs' book The End of Poverty that argues that more aid is the answer, and the right, exemplified in The White Man's Burden by William Easterly that suggests that more aid is the problem. We need a new sort of thinking that grapples with what he calls "three central proposition." First, we now face a development problem that is different than what we've had over the last forty years--not the one billion rich and the five billion poor, but the one billion people stuck at the very bottom. Second, this is not a contest between rich nations romanticizing poverty out of white guilt, but rather a titantic struggle within the bottom billion countries between genuine heroes who are working for change and powerful forces determined to preserve the status quo. Third, "we do not need to be bystanders. Our support for change can be decisive." In sum, Collier argues that we need to "narrow the target and broaden the instruments."
Customer Rating:
Summary: Picking through the preconceptions
Comment: When it comes to problems afflicting the third world, there are a lot of popular misconceptions and misunderstandings as to what is necessary. In this fantastic book, Paul Collier runs through the myths and the realities of the situation.
Some of the most popular misconceptions regarding the third world is regarding the use of aid. Although Collier acknowledges that aid has it's uses, it is most certainly not a miracle cure all. As well as making local goods less competitive it will also increase the likelyhood of a coup d'état in an underdeveloped nation as rebel groups see aid money as a potential reward for overthrowing the government.
The argument for fair trade is also skillfully and intelligently undermined (althought this may not make pleasant reading for some of those involved in this campaign). Collier's studies have determined that despite the superficial benefits, fair trade only encourages third world economies to continue producing nothing but the same product all the time. This robs these economies of the diversity of exports that is so crucial to their growth.
Collier points out that there is no greater trap for bottomo billion countries than the conflict trap. Indeed about 50% of the wars that start in bottom billion countries are relapses into old wars. Here Collier offers a well thought out break from conventional wisdom. Usually all post-war aid is dumped into a country in the two or three years immediately following the conflict. However these years are typically the most disorganised and are most prone to wasted expenditure. The wasted expenditure and resultant poverty can often plunge the country back into war. Collier convincingly argues two solutions, one popular, one unpopular. The extension of aid to ten years after a conflict will be a popular idea and clearly a relatively effective one. However his suggestion of military intervention is likely to be less popular. We must not let Iraq blind us in this respect. The U.N. has done and continues to do effective work in this sphere and perhaps this will help the bottom billion citizens on the road to development.
Ultimately it was very difficult for Paul Collier to anatomise all the problems of the bottom billion in an individual book and it is equally difficult to anatomise his book in this review. All that I must really say is that it is a fantastic and well thouoght out read and enthralling for anyone with an interest in economics and politics.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Politicizing the Poor
Comment: It's hard not to be delighted by this marvelous book. The author does an excellent job sorting through the complexities of economic data to explain why the rising tide of the world's economy is leaving roughly one billion of the world's population, most of them in Africa, mired in what seems to be perpetual misery and poverty. Some of his conclusions are obvious, that being landlocked in a region with poor transportation hurts. Some of it is less obvious, that having a valuable mineral to be extracted may prevent a country from developing other and perhaps more stable sources of export income. We would think that one source of income, say oil or gold, could be used to jump start an economy in other areas.
I do feel, however, that as an economist, he may not fully appreciate the other human factors in national success or failure, particularly non-economic ones when people are driven by obsessions with power and irrational hatreds. Two examples come to mind.
One happened recently to me when I saw someone I work with, an exceptionally kind, soft-spoken and decent man who's from East Africa, carrying a copy of Time magazine that featured Putin as "Man of the Year." When I told him that I saw that as dreadful, that Putin was a thug, he surprised me by disagreeing. Putin, he said, was a "strong man," obviously equating that to being a good leader. Pondering his reasoning, I realized that if the people in a nation lack self-control, if there's no culturally or religiously developed moral standards that keep ethnic or tribal hatreds from spiraling out of control, then a strong man who crushes everyone beneath his boots may seem a welcome relief. But a solution like that never gets rid of the problem. To rule, such a strong man often practices 'divide and conquer,' feeding anger and hatred, in an effort to feel in control. But once trapped in that cycle of hatred requiring dictatorial rule which then feeds hatred, a nation may never escape.
Nor is that pathology confined to impoverished countries. You can find it even in relatively affluent communities in this country. Pastors of virtually all-black churches have reason to fear that their considerable power in the black community will be threatened as their members find fewer and fewer differences between themselves and their white neighbors and co-workers and begin to join churches that are less multi-racial than simply places where race has become irrelevant--as in now is between Caucasians and Asians in Seattle where I live. You've seen the result of that recently in the news. Black pastors, like the Rev. Wright, whose church Obama attends, have to feed racial hatreds, branding all whites as evil and untrustworty and promoting conspiracies as weird as those of anti-Semitism, to retain their role as the "strong man" in the black community. Their power creates and feeds off hatred.
Second, because the author is so well-intentioned himself, when he discusses in Chapter 8 the role of outside military invention in countries torn by war or ethnic violence, he doesn't seem to realize that, particularly in the U.S., foreign policies have domestic implications. For several decades a major slice of the American left has demonstrated an unwillingness to support any sort of agenda that portrays a foe of the left, usually anti-communists, the Republicans, the religious and political conservatives, in a favorable light. That attitude first began with opposition to the Vietnam War. The flight of some two-million Vietnamese from South Vietnam after the US pulled out and the genocide of Pol Pot made no change in the attitude of the anti-war left because that attitude was never motivated by any concern for the Vietnamese people. Combine that deep indifference to human suffering with a willingness to engage in vicious lying and a press that seems incapable of seeing what is happening, and you have a terrible mess.
I saw that attitude myself as a grad student at the University of Washington in the early 1980s. The left on campus was simply incapable of seeing Reagan as anything but the personification of evil. And, as with Rev. Wright, with a major political group seeing everything in light of its own power and willing to slander anyone who gets in the way of that power, it's almost impossible to talk, as the author does so well, about developing sensible policies. The very success of those policies in the hands of a Republican will drive them into irrational rage. To give but one example, in the US the left hates Bush so much, that they obviously don't care what happens to the Iraqi people, all they want to see happen is for Bush to fail. In such a context, the author's hopes for well-executed military inventions in troubled countries are doomed to failure, particularly in the hands of Presidents who are less persistent in the face of criticism than Bush has been over Iraqi.
Much the same can be said about Bush's efforts to provide Africa with economic assistance. Over the short term, those programs may have benefited from their low profile. Attention directed at any success they might have would have triggered nasty attacks by a left in this country that is growing increasing unhinged. But not drawing attention to those success has a downside, it leaves those programs in danger when the Presidency passes to someone else in 2009.
In short, much of the good sense in this book is threatened by the irrationalities and hatreds of domestic politics both here and in Europe.
--Michael W. Perry, editor of Chesterton on War and Peace: Battling the Ideas and Movements that Led to Nazism and World War II
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
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 global poverty. In The Bottom Billion, he offers real hope for solving one of the great humanitarian crises
facing the world today.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
