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

not great

The author basically only cites his own work. One could call this a research in the vacuum...
It is very idealistic and lacks references to prove most of the assertions made.
The ideals of development promotion are extremely relevant, but the book lacks persuasiveness through scientific proof.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

The Bottom Line on World Poverty

This is one the best policy books that I have read and an example of what a good policy book should be all about. It deals with the subject that is often in public spotlight and yet it seems as intractable today as it was decades ago. This sad state of affairs may in at least part be attributed to some of the misunderstanding of what global poverty is all about, who is most affected by it, and what sort of traps those most affected find themselves incapable of escaping. As this book clearly argues, the so called "poverty trap" in and of itself is not a trap at all, since otherwise all World would still be as poor as a few centuries ago. Furthermore, vast segments of the "global poor" actually live in countries that are developing at a more or less steady pace and can expect to be lifted out of that poverty within a generation or two. The ones who seem stuck are the bottom billion of the world population, and this book deals with them. The research that this book is based on comes up with four basic traps that could permanently hinder the poorest countries in development. The traps, some of them counterintuitive, are:

1. The Conflict Trap
2. The Natural Resource Trap
3. Landlocked with Bad Neighbors
4. Bad Governance in a Small Country

Not every one of the poorest countries in the world is subject to all of these traps, but they are subject to at least one of them. Furthermore, Collier is not content to just describe the problem; he offers several courses of action that can deal with them. At least one of them, military interventions, has been largely discredited lately in the eyes of the public and policy wonks alike. However, if we are sincere and serious about helping the poorest in this world, we need to keep the military option open.

All in all, this is a wonderful book that is both data-driven and engaging. Even if you have not followed the issues surrounding global poverty in the past, this book may induce you to get engaged in thinking about it more actively and seriously.

Bottom Billion Review for English Class

The book The Bottom Billion is written by Paul Collier and presents his ideas about how to solve the problems associated with the poorest of the poor, the poorest billion people on earth.The book outlines the four major issues or ¿traps¿ that virtually all of the bottom billion have in common and hypothesizes that there are tangible solutions to reduce the plight of this group of people. He acknowledges that there is no cookie cutter answer that will solve all of the problems because no two countries that make up the poorest of the poor are alike. Haiti in the Western Hemisphere, Laos in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan in Central Asia point to the variety of places and people that comprise the bottom billion. The complexities of solving such a problem cannot be limited to a single book or the ideas of a single person. Therefore, I do not fully support all of his ideas but do consider them to serve as a very real framework for discussions that may lead to tangible change in some of the most needy parts of the world.

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