I thought this book might be an effective counterpoint to William Easterly's "The Elusive Quest for Growth," but instead of focusing on foreign aid, Collier focuses on the internal problems in poor countries that inhibit economic growth, and thus he largely complements rather than contradicts Easterly's analysis. This work is based on an entire career of rigorous scientific research, and Collier puts it to good use in a book that is both dense and fast-paced.

Collier has identified four main "traps" to economic growth in the Third World, namely, conflict, the natural resource curse, being landlocked, and bad governance. Everyone acknowledges that these are problems, but Collier is the only one who has done the analysis needed to tease out how big these problems are, and, at least hypothetically, to find out where causation lies in the poverty cycle.

Importantly, Collier counsels against focusing on the trendy metrics for Third World success so often used by anti-growth and anti-trade advocates, such as environmental habitat protection and female schooling. These may indeed be important, but Collier argues that the fundamental problem with poor countries is that they're, well, poor, and that the best thing that can be done for them is to get them out of poverty. Per Capita GDP growth, then, is the best measure for success in escaping poverty. This may seem to be almost an intuitive tautology, but when Collier worked at the World Bank the most controversial paper he wrote was "Growth is Good for the Poor." This even garnered him a concerned call from WB President Jim Wolfensohn. This is downright depressing.

Collier also attacks those other enablers of Third World poverty, First World sympathizers with Third World revolutionaries, whom he accuses of indulging in Marxist romanticism. As Collier thoroughly documents, most of these "revolutionaries" are no more than armed thugs. Statistically speaking, rebels in poor countries aren't any more likely to be poor than the country as a whole, or to come from an area with more inequality, or to live in a country with political repression, or even to live in a country with a colonial history. In a poll done in the Nigerian delta, rebels were no more likely to feel "aggrieved" about the government than non-rebels. Most just want resources and guns. As an example he describes the Fijian revolutionaries who chanted "Fijians for Fijians" in 1999 as their leader began an armed struggle against their "foreign-dominated" government. Just turns out the rebels' leader had recently served as a consultant for an American mahogany company that lost out on a government contract and he, understandably, wanted revenge and a new contract. In the vast majority of cases, these are the real reasons for Third World rebellion.

Most surprising perhaps, Collier found that countries with more ethnic diversity didn't seem to have more civil wars, contrary to everything we hear in the media. Countries who have a diversity of ethnicities AND who have one ethnicity in a slight majority, a condition he calls "ethnic dominance," do tend to have a slightly increased chance for war, but this is a relatively small statistical relationship and most of the countries in the "bottom billion" are far too ethnically diverse for this to have any effect.

The main correlates he finds with civil war seem to be: a large country with population focused along the outskirts (more places for rebels to hide, see Congo), natural resources, more young people, and most importantly, poverty and low growth. Coups are like civil wars in terms of causes except natural resources don't matter (but increased aid seems to encourage more grabbing for the government largesse). The best prophylactic in both cases is wealth and economic growth. For this, he advocates increased aid to infrastructure, aid conditioned (ex poste, importantly) on already implemented reforms, and a focus on liberating the press and ensuring due process of law in democratic government, not mere electoral competition, which, on its own, seems to lead only to more corruption.

One of his most interesting findings is that democracies do tend to grow faster than autocracies in most cases. Previous researchers have found little correlation between democracy and growth, or sometimes even said that dictatorship helped a country economically, but Collier shows they forgot one important factor, natural resources. In the absence of natural resources democracies outgrow autocracies by about 2% a year, a huge difference. But when natural resources (oil, diamonds, timber, etc.) are more than 8% of a countries' revenue, autocracies outgrow democracies, apparently because democracies tend to thirst more after the resource rents and spend it on pork-barrel projects. Democracies can fix that problem though by having more property protection and more free press, after which they come out ahead again. Autocracies are also especially bad in ethnically diverse societies (like Iraq, as opposed to homogeneous China), while ethnically diverse democracies tend to thrive (see Botswana). So points for ethnically-diverse democracy!

There's much more here, most of it fascinating. Almost all of the research behind it, however, is based on numberless multivariate regressions, and that makes me somewhat suspicious. With about 150 poor or developing countries to investigate, there is some room for statistics, but that's still a fairly low N number, subject to endless machinations. In any case, the amount of support he's received internationally since this book's been published is encouraging, and hopefully it will point a new direction for First World assistance.