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

by Paul Collier

The first link we found was between risk of war and initial level of income. Civil war is much more likely to break out in low-income countries: halve the starting income of the country and you double the risk of civil war.

The Normans, a small group of violent, French-speaking Vikings, killed the English elite, stole all the land, and subjected the native 98 percent of the population to two centuries of servitude. During this time there were many civil wars. None of them was a rebellion of English serfs against Norman masters. All the civil wars were one bunch of Norman barons against another, trying to grab yet more resources.

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.

The reform-induced growth only helped slightly to offset the misery of falling living standards. That is what happened, but it is not what Nigerians think happened. Unsurprisingly, Nigerians think that the terrible increase in poverty they experienced was caused by the economic reforms that were so loudly trumpeted. Until reform, life was getting better; then along came reform, and poverty soared. Given that belief, Nigerians go on to ask the obvious question: why did we undergo such devastating “reform”? The answer they arrive at, which is inescapable given the previous steps, is that the international financial institutions conspired to ruin Nigeria.

Why do big resource revenues weaken political restraints? One reason is obvious: they radically reduce the need to tax. Because resource-rich countries do not need to tax, they do not provoke citizens into supplying the public good of scrutiny over how their taxes are being spent. While in its general form this undermining of accountability has been understood for a long time, it has usually been seen as an explanation of why resource-rich societies are more likely to be autocratic. Our key point is that this same undermining of accountability operates within polities that, at least on the criterion of electoral competition, are democratic. What gets undermined is not electoral competition but the political restraints on how power is used.

Meanwhile, the Western left, locked in its domestic struggle with U.S. president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, conflated the limited reforms being urged on the governments of the bottom billion with the neoliberal savaging of the state they were fighting at home. As a result, reforms that should have been popular with all except corrupt elites became toxic in the media both within and outside Africa. The essential struggle between villains and heroes within the bottom billion became twisted into one between Africa and the IMF.

Starting from being a failing state, a country was more likely to achieve a sustained turnaround the larger its population, the greater the proportion of its population that had secondary education, and—perhaps more surprisingly—if it had recently emerged from civil war. Among the many characteristics that did not seem to matter one way or the other were democracy and political rights.

In the next part of the book we will at last turn from the depressing scenarios of traps and limbos to what we can do about them. Let me be clear: we cannot rescue them. The societies of the bottom billion can only be rescued from within.