When the Oxonian Review sat down with Paul Collier in his office at Oxford’s Centre for the Study of African Economies, he had just returned from a visit with the US State Department, where he had briefed top American policy makers on his rescue plan for the world’s poorest countries. With the publication of his first book, The Bottom Billion (2007), Paul Collier established himself as a premier authority on international development, presenting aid solutions for the world’s poorest billion inhabitants. In his newest book, Wars, Guns and Votes, Collier moves into the contentious realm of policymaking. Collier anticipates controversy. He writes in Wars, Guns and Votes: “I am aware that I walk on a tightrope.” And he is. Wars, Guns and Votes came out in the UK last week.

A major theme of your book is that democracy can be dangerous if elections are installed without providing the critical public good of security. You propose a game plan that involves installing peacekeepers to the bottom billion countries for at least a decade. This calls for long term intervention by the international community. Could you clarify your criteria for when national sovereignty should be breached?

I think national sovereignty being breached is a melodramatic way of putting it, but there are two distinct contexts that concern us. One is post-conflict situations. Obviously, in conflict situations, when they begin, something has gone terribly wrong with the poverty; you’ve had a civil war. The record of these post-conflict periods is not very happy… about 40 percent of these countries go back into conflict within a decade, and they are responsible for about half of the civil wars that have happened. So we should be able to, as an international community, do much better than that record.

The international community has a big responsibility to the whole neighbourhood because if these situations go wrong, it is the whole neighbourhood that bears the responsibility, not just the country itself.  This is one reason why there is a case for limiting sovereignty or sharing sovereignty on behalf of the legitimate interest of the neighbourhood. The international community is providing peace through the peacekeepers and the money for reconstruction and that gives it both the power and the legitimacy to make sure that the recovery works. […]

There are three key actors and there are no quick fixes. There is the Security Council which is providing the peacekeepers. There are the donors who are providing the money. And there’s the post-conflict government which is setting the policies and also determining how accountable they are to the people. So what I propose is a contract between these three parties and to recognise the interdependence.

But what about the third actor? The local government? Don’t you think that your game plan gives Mugabe the exact propaganda he needs to say: “Look, Western policemen are taking over Africa?”

Of course he will. You can hear him say it. You have to use your brain and say who has actually got the interest of these societies? Is it Mugabe with his fine record or is it mine? The truth is that there is no appetite for a new bout of colonialism. On the contrary, the main problem is that the appetite for concern is so low, and the prevailing sentiment is: “Just wash your hands of it and do things that are decorative.” So, the difficulty is not trying to restrain a voraciously powerful West that wants to restore colonialism, it’s trying to persuade a West that is [complacent]. I was on Capitol Hill just recently and the sentiment that was expressed to me, in the case of Somalia, was: “Build a fence around it and walk by.”

And what a lot of the bottom billion countries have is not national sovereignty; it’s presidential sovereignty. Presidents won’t share power with their own citizens. It’s grotesque that Mugabe is still in power, and certainly not thanks to the endorsement of [Zimbabwe’s] people. Nor will they pool power with their neighbouring government. […]

Presidents are clinging onto power vis-a-vis their own populations and vis-a-vis their neighbours. The result is that their states are not capable of supplying key public goods, so they’ll have to be supplied internationally.

Just now, you mentioned that you went to Washington to convince people to buy into your plan. And in the book, you put yourself in the shoes of a rational dictator weighing pros and cons of allowing international intervention. If you were in front of Mugabe now and had the ear of Obama, how would you persuade them both to sign onto your plan?

I was in the State Department on Monday and talking through these issues. Clearly, the Administration has a lot of legitimacy in Africa. If there were a fair election in Zimbabwe between Mugabe and Obama, Obama would win it easily. So in terms of who is the most legitimate actor, it is clearly Obama. So the issue with America is not legitimacy but overload. It’s whether they see sufficient interest to move. And the argument has to be a combination of an ethical argument based on compassion (here are people socially integrated into the world but economically completely marginalised; they cannot provide the key public goods themselves, so we have to help them to back out of the cul-de-sac they’re in), and a degree of enlightened self-interest—that it is actually foolish to leave societies so precarious that some of them become Somalias. The strategy of building a fence around Somalia and hoping that it disappears seems to me, really, an ostrich-line strategy.

The muddle over American intervention or non-intervention has been so extreme, ranging from total non-intervention (Somalia) to total intervention (Iraq), and a new discourse coming out of Hilary Clinton is “smart power”. That’s a hopeful discourse because what she means is a minimal use of hard power aligned with an intelligent use of soft power. And that seems to me to be the right approach because we haven’t got much appetite for hard power, but […] we can show that the minimum of hard power aligned with an intelligent use of soft power (money, international standards, legitimacy of Obama) can make a difference.

How was your dual argument for ethical compassion and enlightened self-interest received when you actually talked about this to Washington? Did they buy it?

Oh, absolutely. There’s a lot of buy in. I’ve been amazed ever since the publication of The Bottom Billion, there’s been a huge interest on the part of government to align with the agenda. Obviously, not people like Mugabe… they’re a part of the problem.

So the State Department got on board with this?

Well, you have to ask the State Department. But they invited me, and yes, I think there’s a lot of interest both in Europe and in America.

What were their objections?

I think… one strand of opinion would be basically pessimistic and say we’ve failed and failed, there is no point in trying anymore. So there’s a lot of fatigue and despair. And the other sentiment is the sort of, “build a fence and ignore it”…

So the White House didn’t object to your plan based on shortage of resources?

No. And of course, my approach is not just saying that all we need is twice as much money as you’d ever thought of. It’s a matter of marrying money with other policy interventions such as trade, governance, security. For example, I am having a discourse with the American administration on Haiti at the moment. They’ve already done the trade deal with Haiti. So now, the thing to do is to provide the rather modest amount of money that would make it feasible to export on the basis of that trade deal.

The US government has been involved in several coups of democratically elected leaders. Given that track record, do you think it’s really plausible for African dictators to buy into your proposed bait of offering to help them put down possible coups?

What I would like to see military intervention to be used for is to discourage coup d’états. There have been three coups in West Africa in this past week. I’m sure at this very moment, African presidents really are lying awake at night worrying about coup d’états. And the tragedy of coup d’états is that they displace democratic governments just as much as bad governments. Now, I don’t think we should try and prevent all coup d’états… the international community should use its military force to restore democratically elected governments—I don’t see any ethical issue in that. It would actually be disgraceful to do anything else. We already did it in Sierra Leone and nobody accused the international community of neo-colonialism in doing that. So there is a legitimate role for force, serious force in protecting democratic governments.

Now, the neat twist to that is that once you’ve got an undertaking to protect democratic governments, there has to be one condition at least, which is that the government conducts a democratic election. If it cheats, it should not be protected. So I propose an international standard that governments could undertake to adopt on the conduct of elections. And if they adopted that standard, they would be protected, as long as they conducted the election properly. If they then subsequently cheated on an election, that cover against the coup would be withdrawn, and the withdrawal would be a signal. Knowing that, presidents would be much more weary of cheating on elections…

What I was asking was not a normative question of whether or not the US and the international community should intervene to install democratic elections. I am saying that sometimes, the US government actually intervenes to put down democratically governments. Given this track record, how can they be trusted to safeguard democracy?

That’s why it is so important to have clear rules of engagement. When is it legitimate to use military force and when is it not? America’s got a force AFRICOM and that force needs clear rules of engagement because otherwise, as you say, it is going to be treated with a lot of suspicion. But the right rule of engagement is not “never intervene”. If there were a coup in Ghana tomorrow, the right rule of engagement would be to fly in and restore the legitimate government. If there were a coup in Zimbabwe tomorrow, the right rule of engagement would not be to fly in and restore Mugabe—and so we need clear rules to delineate that.

You propose a ten-year period of peacekeeping, during which the economy of the [post-conflict] country is supposed to double. If the economy doesn’t double, what do you propose then?

First of all, there’s already a lot of peacekeepers in there, there are over 100,000 of them now, so this is the future, like it or not. So, the question is really complementary strategies to peacekeeping. Precisely because these economies go so far down during the conflict, it’s relatively easy to get strong growth post-conflict, as long as you’ve got some restoration of reasonable policies, a guarantee of security and flows of aid. So it’s not difficult to get rapid growth. If you don’t get growth, then it’s true, quite possibly you haven’t got a viable exit strategy. Then you’ve got some hard choices, but the world doesn’t come in nice easy boxes.

What are some of those choices?

Well, do you pull the troops out anyway? Or, do you say: “This is harder than we thought, this is longer than we thought.” So, take a country like Liberia or Sierra Leone, or Haiti. So far, economic recovery hasn’t been that great. So does the international community just say: “Time’s up, bye-bye?”

Personally, I think that would be very foolish. Post-conflict is often messy, so the right thing to do is to do what it takes to get recovery… the US left over 100,000 troops in Europe for 40 years to get recovery, and it was a good strategy…it was the right thing to do.

Diana Fu is reading for a DPhil in Politics at Linacre College, Oxford, and is Politics Editor of the Oxonian Review. Amreeta Mathai is reading for an MPhil in Development Studies at St. Anne’s College, Oxford.

Photograph courtesy of Paul Collier

Paul Collier
Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places
The Bodley Head, 2009
272 pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-1847920218

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When development economics guru Paul Collier released his bestselling book The Bottom Billion (2007), Niall Ferguson welcomed him into the fold of the African development debate with a punch: “Now comes another white man, ready to shoulder the burden of saving Africa.” Despite the jab, however, Ferguson went on to praise Collier’s approach, which focused on four “traps” that maintain extreme poverty among the world’s poorest billion inhabitants. Ferguson called Collier’s analysis “more convincing” and his remedies “more plausible” than those offered by the other popular giants of development economics, William Easterly and Jeffrey Sachs.

In his newest book Wars, Guns and Votes, Collier has shifted his discussion to the failing democracies that govern many of the world’s poorest “bottom billion”. He argues that elections often create the façade of democracy in bottom billion countries rather than democracy itself. Lacking the enforcement and balance-of-power mechanisms of real democracy, these countries remain on the brink of instability and vulnerable to the sort of violence that stalls development. The post-election violence and controversy surrounding the Kenyan and Zimbabwean elections, the most recent and vivid examples of democracy gone wrong in bottom billion countries, seemed to prove Collier’s point.

Collier offers a nuanced and compelling diagnosis of the driving factors behind post-election violence and persistent bad governance in Africa’s bottom billion democracies. One such factor is inadequate information dispersal, which leaves voters in bottom billion countries in the dark about candidates’ political positions and personal histories. Suspicious of the information they do receive, voters start to make decisions based on who they think is most likely to forward their own interests, often voting divisively along ethnic or religious lines. When honesty and a record of competence fail to offer an advantage in elections, the result, Collier argues, is that “the crooks will replace the honest as candidates”. Wars, Guns and Votes drives to the root of the illiberal democracy that governs many of the world’s poorest; Collier perceptively describes how democracy in its malformed varieties promotes instability and poverty rather than peace and development.

But the analytical rigour that Collier applies to his diagnosis of bad governance in the first part of his book is then absent in his book’s final section of proposed solutions. This becomes particularly troubling when he arrives at his more provocative suggestions. For example, Collier asserts that the West, cognizant of colonialism’s sins, pays “excessive respect” to the “notion of national sovereignty”. What Western donor countries have failed to realise, he says, is that “in reality the typical society of the bottom billion does not have national sovereignty”. Rather, because they lack the ability to constrain the power of an election’s winner, “they have presidential sovereignty”, which can come in the form of democracy-backed dictatorship. We should not, Collier argues, be so ready to revere this sort of sovereignty.

For Collier, sovereignty is defined by a country’s ability and imperative to govern for the people. When bottom billion governments fail to provide key public goods like security, accountability and transparency, he posits that the “international community”—a term that he fails to define in any consistent or plausible fashion—bears responsibility to intervene and supply them. He proposes a number of methods of intervention: most notable are long-term peacekeeping and a system of shared sovereignty (the bottom billion nation would agree to “share” its sovereignty with the international community). In a post-Iraq, post-colonial world, such controversial “remedies” require great clarity of method and purpose. Collier fumbles in answering the question of when, exactly, intervention is warranted and how, exactly, it should be carried out—and confused prescriptions for intervention are, as they always have been, particularly dangerous.

Once the “international community” intervenes in a post-conflict country, how long do they stay and to what end? Collier says the international community should stay for the long haul: “Aid-assisted economic recovery is the true exit strategy for peace-keepers.” But debates on the effectiveness of long-term peacekeeping and aid are particularly contentious for good reason. To propose such measures as if their validity is obvious is to ignore studies that suggest how long-term peacekeeping and aid actually can exacerbate, rather than mitigate, unstable situations.

Collier sidesteps these issues by comparing his suggested intervention to the Marshall Plan. The vague historical comparison brushes over one of many extremely relevant differences: George C. Marshall did not doubt the sovereignty of post-war European nations in the way that Collier does in Sub-Saharan Africa. In fact, in a speech delivered at Harvard University in 1947, Marshall made it clear that the aid package was to be directed to the needs of Europe as stated by Europeans. He declared: “This is the business of the Europeans. The initiative, I think, must come from Europe.”

While Marshall, in forwarding his comprehensive plan for aid, was confident in Europe’s ability to guide its own development, Collier clearly suggests that bottom billion governments cannot do the same. Post-war Europe was re-building its institutions, national infrastructure and informed electorate; that project was entirely different from the building project Collier envisions for the bottom billion.

While we might agree that intervention to quell genocide or to help a sovereign government avert disaster is justified or morally imperative, the grounds for Collier’s suggested intervention are muddled. It seems apt to compare Collier’s proposals to the Bush administration’s nation-building project in Iraq, where the strategy was to enforce peace in a post-election nation and at the same time funnel resources that would promote economic development. By most accounts, the strategy was a disaster.

While Collier does make a valuable contribution by furthering an understanding of the pragmatics of democracy’s failures in bottom billion nations, his lack of clarity on intervention treads on territory that blurs the line between aid and occupation, assistance and intervention. A respected scholar, Collier has won the confidence and audience of several world leaders; it would be irresponsible to use this influence to forward confused plans for intervention, something that, particularly in light of recent history, raises eyebrows the world over.

Amreeta Mathai is reading for an MPhil in Development Studies at St. Anne’s College, Oxford.

Paul Collier
The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries
Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
Oxford University Press, 2007
224 pages
£16.99
ISBN 978-0195311457

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Imagine the journey that human beings embarked on with the development of the first Stone Age tools.  It led us toward a lush-looking mountain which, with progressive social and technological evolution, we then began to climb.  Since that beginning, the peak—if there is one—has remained permanently shrouded in cloud, but at progressively higher levels we find that our lives are richer than before.  Certainly there are very few at any level who would prefer to return to a lower one.  This is the Mountain of Development, and the populations of all the countries in the world are at different positions in the climb.  That is, the human race has become segregated in its ascent.  Some countries are mapping previously uncharted territory of prosperity and well-being on the higher reaches of the mountain.  Others are still working their way around the lower contours.  And even within countries there are differences; some have their citizens clustered close together, others are strung-out over great distances or even split into two or three groups that are barely linked at all.

Paul Collier argues that as a result, one billion of us (a sixth of the world’s population) have reached an altitude where levels of prosperity are beginning to approximate some kind of ideal.  Another four billion are some distance behind, but will reach these higher slopes in the near future due to their growing strength and experience.  But the final billion are struggling.  In fact, they are trapped on the lowest slopes, and in some cases sliding further and further down.  Most of these countries—approximately 70%, excluding the likes of Laos, Cambodia, North Korea, Haiti, and others—are African.  Based on a concern for our fellow human beings and an interest in our societal future, Collier asserts that the primary development objective of the wealthy OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries and international development agencies should be to help this ‘bottom billion’ in their ascent.

Collier, head of the Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE) at Oxford, is one of the most important and influential authors in development economics. In addition to his work with co-authors on aid, civil war, development, poverty, capital flight and the interactions between these, The Bottom Billion builds on two papers he co-authored in 1999 with Jan Gunning that are now primary references on sub-Saharan Africa’s poor post-independence economic performance.  The book is also the continuation of a more than decade-long academic debate about why some countries have experienced little or no economic growth.  The two other main positions are represented by The End of Poverty written by Jeffrey Sachs—perhaps best known to most as the Special Advisor to the current and previous Secretaries General of the United Nations—and William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden.  Towards the end of The Bottom Billion Collier explicitly situates his analysis between these two extremes.  One the one hand, he agrees with Easterly that aid is not the primary solution, and that therefore the excessive focus of Sach’s proposals on external financial support is misplaced.  However, unlike Easterly he does believe, like Sachs, that there is still much which can be done by outsiders at a fairly broad level.  In that sense his is a message of optimism.

Collier’s own approach in The Bottom Billion, captured by our mountain analogy, begs a number of questions which are worth noting before we proceed.  First, the idea that all countries are aiming at the same notion of a developed society (i.e. climbing the same mountain) might seem a little more plausible following the end of the Cold War, but there are many cogent voices which suggest the traditional Western notion of development is flawed.  Second, the premise that it is possible, or desirable, to determine what is best for other nations is one that has been historically controversial.  Third, while Collier acknowledges that the nature of growth matters (rather than simply its extent), it is an issue that he otherwise ignores. Finally, and perhaps most problematically, Collier assumes that the middle four billion’s ascent toward prosperity is assured.

The book begins promisingly by arguing that a one-size-fits-all approach to development is inappropriate.  But although one is deemed insufficient, apparently four sizes are enough, because in the second part Collier argues that every country in the bottom billion can be characterised by at least one of four traps: the conflict trap, the natural resources trap, the ‘landlocked with bad neighbours’ trap, and the ‘bad governance in a small country’ trap. These categories seem somewhat arbitrary and akin to methodological gerrymandering.  Why not the ‘surrounded by one country, mountainous and AIDS-afflicted’ trap, which would crudely characterise the Southern African country of Lesotho?  Though whether Lesotho would even fall into Collier’s bottom billion is unclear, because he chooses not to publish the list of fifty-eight countries on the basis that this might ‘stigmatise’ them. (An odd decision, since he appears happy to give individual examples.)

The basis for the creation of the categories as the four main predictors of poverty was ostensibly the econometric analysis (the use of statistical methods in economics) conducted by Collier and his co-authors over the last decade. On one issue at least, the consideration of natural resources, this type of analysis appears to yield some important insights.  A simplistic assessment of the matter might conclude that countries do better when they receive resource windfalls, but in fact this seems to be more the exception than the rule. Collier does a good job discussing the reasons for this: the resource boom displaces other economic activities, reduces the competitiveness of manufactured exports, and creates dangerous political incentives.  The discussion regarding the impact of being land-locked, on the other hand, is vaguely informative but yields nothing new.  In terms of the other two traps, it is hardly surprising to find a relation at the national level between poverty, conflict, and poor governance.  But do we need econometric analysis to tell us this?  More specifically, does an econometric analysis reach conclusions that we could not have reached otherwise, or succeed in giving these conclusions greater validity?

This is one of the main problems of The Bottom Billion: Collier uses econometric analyses to give his arguments weight that they wouldn’t otherwise have.  He regularly makes the point that his claims are based on ‘a mass of technical papers published in professional journals and subjected to blind refereeing’.  Two issues arise.

First, as any professional economist should know, publication of papers based on empirical analysis doesn’t imply their conclusions are true.  It just means the analytical process by which they were reached is not obviously flawed.  That both Sachs and (particularly) Easterly are widely-published should make that clear.  For instance, consider the question of whether aid makes a difference to economic growth.  Some published papers say it increases growth, some say it doesn’t and more recent ones say ‘it depends’ what other factors you control for.  Second, it is all too easy to weave a plausible story around an econometric result. This occurs in a number of places in the book.  One example is the somewhat counterintuitive result that the propensity for oil-related violence in Niger Delta regions decreases in association with higher numbers of oil wells.  Another is the finding that aid appears to reduce the chance of wars, but does not have the same effect on coups.  That selectivity in explanation carries over to inferring causality from correlations.  In one case, for instance, Collier makes the causal statement that a resource-rich country shifting ‘from autocracy to intense electoral competition would lower [its] growth rate by nearly 3%’, but in other places he explicitly refrains from this type of assertion.

Such definitive statements are typically beyond the bounds of what can be determined at the country level when employing the statistical tools of economics in a responsible way. In part this is due to the actual economic theory of growth being unsatisfactory, particularly with respect to developing countries.  To return to our earlier analogy: there isn’t even agreement on whether poorer countries not stuck in the quagmires of the bottom billion should be able to climb the mountain faster because the lower slopes are easier to ascend, or whether by virtue of having developed superior techniques and tools the rich countries are destined to stretch their lead inexorably into the future.  (This is referred to as the ‘convergence’ issue in growth theory.)

Given the credibility derived from using an econometric approach, is it true that Collier’s diagnosis and recommended cures are fundamentally a function of econometric evidence?  The short answer is that they are not. Many of the problems could be diagnosed in a way that combined qualitative insights with much more simple analysis of the statistics. In addition, the policies proposed as solutions rarely make recourse to statistical analysis of the kind that was apparently so important for diagnosing the problems.  As a result Collier appears guilty, in both a methodological and practical sense, of what the African economist Thandika Mkandawire once called ‘the pessimism of the diagnosis and the optimism of the prescription’.

Neither can Collier’s arguments be rescued by appeal to solid qualitative evidence.  The first half of the book contains many examples of poor attempts to illustrate the ‘statistical evidence’.  For instance, is De Beers an example of corporate social responsibility because they have worked to reduce the sale of blood diamonds?  Or did they realise that they could strengthen their diamond cartel by implementing a system which excluded the entry of non-licensed stones?  Is the Mozambican rebel group Renamo the best example of a movement started to fight for social justice that became increasingly dominated by opportunists, when it was actually started in part by the apartheid government in South Africa to destabilise the post-independence government of Mozambique?  Is it not a little dishonest to cite Botswana as a shining example of economic development when, despite sustained GDP growth on the back of diamond production, most citizens remain unemployed, or in subsistence agriculture, and HIV prevalence is among the highest in the world?  (Neither of which, one must add, is due primarily to bad governance, but simply the limited success of attempts to diversify the economy and combat HIV infection.)  Doesn’t recent research suggest that civil wars in Africa may not increase the prevalence of HIV in affected countries, contrary to what Collier claims and also contrary to what had been previously thought?

In the same vein, the book suffers from significant historical omissions and revisions. Most notably, pre-independence colonial history is completely ignored.  This omission is particularly egregious in the African context, where most of the countries in question were once colonies, delineated and structured around natural resource extraction with minimal local development.  One could argue that the current economic problems facing the bottom billion are separable from anything other than their recent pasts, but it is a doubtful claim and Collier doesn’t even attempt to make it.   At one point he does say, ‘In retrospect, it was perhaps a mistake for the international system to permit economically unviable areas to become independent countries…’.  Would that be the ‘international system’ under which Africa was carved-up among the colonial powers for the exploitation of slave labour and natural resources?

Were such revisionism simply tailoring the argument to an audience uninterested in historical baggage one might overlook it.  However, it also results in flawed analysis. Can one discuss ethnic strife in countries like Rwanda without considering the colonial influence?  Is it coherent to decry the role of aid in financing military expenditures, but ignore the hypocritical role of many OECD countries in securing arms deals with dubious states?  Is Tanzania really an example of Uganda’s ‘bad neighbours’ because it invaded the latter, when in fact this was only because the brutal dictator Idi Amin first sent his troops to invade northern Tanzania? Relatedly, though he steers clear of ideologically-based free-market economics, Collier feels the need to defend the structural adjustment policies (SAPs) ‘negotiated’ with developing countries by the IMF and World Bank in the 1980s.  This may not be a coincidence, given that Collier has worked for the World Bank, but it is unfortunate.  SAPs have been used as excuses for economic failure by some governments, but there are documented examples—such as the Mozambican cashew nut industry—where components of the policies destroyed whole sections of various countries’ economies.

Many of these mistakes or selective inaccuracies do not radically harm Collier’s arguments, but they make one very sceptical of the soundness of the story being sold to relatively uninformed audiences.

Despite this, many aspects of the book are praiseworthy.  Collier is frankly critical about the role of Western countries in resource-related corruption, and relative to many economists, he manages to consider the impact of globalisation on poor countries in a non-ideological manner.  (Concluding, incidentally, that it has done them more harm than good.)  In considering possible solutions to the identified problems, he does not exclude certain options merely for the sake of political correctness.  Furthermore, unlike some of his predecessors—such as Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winner who authored Globalisation and its Discontents—Collier does give some consideration to how the various changes in OECD policy might be enacted within the existing power structures.

For those already familiar with the issues raised, the book is worth reading because of the spectrum of policy proposals it makes and the fact that it will almost certainly be influential.  Those unfamiliar with the facts and debates will no doubt find it interesting, but would do well to approach it with a sceptical eye.

Overall, where the The Bottom Billion succeeds is in characterising the failure to engage with the development challenges it outlines.  On one hand it successfully critiques many past approaches to growth and development: ill-informed military interventions, excessive rigidity and myopia in development agencies, well-intentioned but misplaced actions by NGOs, and excessively ideological positions on globalisation and its effects on the poorest countries.  In these respects it is a breath of fresh air.  On the other hand, the book itself serves as an example of the very serious problem with the way in which economists inform policy.

Contrary to Collier’s assertion in his introduction, no intractable questions are cracked.  Despite great and admirable efforts to the contrary, economics is simply not a science at such a broad level. Economic theories of growth remain contested and largely of abstract intellectual interest. The result, one of the lesser-known ironies of economics, is that those practitioners most eager to make sweeping, definitive statements based on econometric analysis are often those with either the least understanding of its theoretical underpinnings and practical constraints, or the most willing to overlook them.  Thus the most useful policy recommendations and much of the preceding discussion in The Bottom Billion are, I would suggest, more a function of Collier’s broad qualitative experience and are only tenuously linked to the cited statistical analysis.  This, then, is the economist’s burden: that the tools exclusive to the field are incapable of answering the social and economic questions that are most important.  Hundreds of years on and with the benefit of hindsight there is still debate about what precisely enabled the current crop of developed countries to scale the slopes of the development mountain at such speed; it would be foolhardy to think that people who cannot even answer this question can tell us how the rather different countries of the bottom billion can emulate them.

Seán Mfundza Muller is a South African student reading for an MPhil in Economics at Oxford.

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