The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (Grove Art)

by Paul Collier

four traps that have received less attention: the conflict trap, the natural resources trap, the trap of being landlocked with bad neighbors, and the trap of bad governance in a small country.

of 2006 there are around 980 million people living in these trapped countries.

Seventy percent of these people are in Africa,

fifty-eight countries that fall into this group,

In the bottom billion average life expectancy is fifty years, whereas in the other developing countries it is sixty-seven years.

the middle four billion—have experienced rapid and accelerating growth in per capita income.

During the 1980s and 1990s their growth rate accelerated to 4 percent a year.

the 1980s the performance of the bottom billion got much worse, declining at 0.4 percent a year.

There was no society-wide reason for hope.

the problem of the bottom billion has not been that they have had the wrong type of growth, it is that they have not had any growth.

development is about giving hope to ordinary people that their children will live in a society that has caught up with the rest of the world.

Take that hope away and the smart people will use their energies not to develop their society but to escape from it—as have a million Cubans.

Seventy-three percent of people in the societies of the bottom billion have recently been through a civil war or are still in one.

Civil war is much more likely to break out in low-income countries:

low income and slow growth make a country prone to civil war,

Kabila needed a satellite phone: in order to strike deals with resource extraction companies. By the time he reached Kinshasa he reportedly had arranged $500 million worth of deals.

So low income, slow growth, and primary commodity dependence make a country prone to civil war, but are they the real causes of civil war?

Surprisingly frequently, a hypothesized root cause turns out to be predictable if you already know the hobbyhorse of the speaker.

guns used by the IRA came from the Boston police department

There is basically no relationship between political repression and the risk of civil war.

no relationship between whether a group was politically repressed and the risk of civil war.

income inequality, and to our surprise we could find no relationship.

no relationship between the subsequent risk of civil war and either the country that had been the colonial power or how long the country had been decolonized.

worst case of ethnic discrimination I can think of occurred after the Norman invasion of England.

All the civil wars were one bunch of Norman barons against another,

The lower a country’s income at the onset of a conflict, the longer the conflict lasts.

The average international war, which is nasty enough, lasts about six months. You can do a lot of damage in six months. But the average civil war lasts more than ten times as long, even longer if you start off poor.

Civil war tends to reduce growth by around 2.3 percent per year, so the typical seven-year war leaves a country around 15 percent poorer than it would have been.

Overwhelmingly, the people who die are not killed in active combat but succumb to disease.

Scholars are now starting to study the rebel recruitment process

on average about 3 percent of any population have psychopathic tendencies,

Others will be attracted by the prospect of power and riches, however unlikely;

So what characteristics did make people more likely to engage in political violence? Well, the three big ones were being young, being uneducated, and being without dependents.

All in all, the cost of a typical civil war to the country and its neighbors can be put at around $64 billion. In recent decades about two new civil wars have started each year,

the risk that a country in the bottom billion falls into civil war in any five-year period is nearly one in six,

Sooner or later some combination of personalities and mistakes that in a more economically successful country would be brushed aside escalates into rebellion.

Once a war has begun, the economic damage undoes the growth achieved during peace.

guns become cheap during conflict because so many get imported

The end of the political fighting ushers in a boom in homicides.

the typical postconflict country has little better than a fifty-fifty chance of making it through the first decade in peace.

countries are prone to coups for reasons pretty similar to those that make them prone to civil war. The two big risk factors are low income and low growth—

former vice president of Ghana.

explained why the government considered itself safe: “By the time we came to power there was nothing left to steal.”

surplus from natural resource exports significantly reduces growth.

about 29 percent of the people in the bottom billion live in countries in which resource wealth dominates the economy.

resource exports cause the country’s currency to rise in value against other currencies. This makes the country’s other export activities uncompetitive.

generally democracies tend to underinvest: governments are so fixated on winning the next election

The resource-rich democracies not only underinvest but invest badly, with too many white-elephant projects.

Electoral competition forces political parties to attract votes in the most cost-effective manner. In normal circumstances this is done by delivering public services

Patronage starts to look cost-effective for a political party if votes can be bought wholesale by bribing a few opinion leaders;