Prosperity: Instruments of Change

We've now glanced at the four poverty traps listed in Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion. To summarize, Collier writes concerning the people of the bottom billion:

"Seventy-three percent of them have been through civil war, 29percent of them are in countries dominated by the politics of natural resource revenues, 30 percent are landlocked, resource-scarce, and in a bad neighborhood, and 76 percent have been through a prolonged period of bad governance and poor economic policies. Adding up these percentages you will realize that some countries have been in more than one trap, either simultaneously or sequentially." (79)

Collier then spends the book's second half reviewing various options for addressing the bottom billion's poverty. He suggests that the challenge will be more difficult for the remaining poor nations and that globalization actually increases the barrier. A few decades ago, there was a small community of wealthy nations, and most of the world was impoverished. Presently there are more wealthy nations and an array of countries at various places on a continuum moving toward greater wealth. These are the nations that are integrated into the global economy. The remaining poor nations are stuck at the bottom of the continuum as the rest of the world pulls away. Metaphorically, we could say the low-hanging fruit and some of the fruit just above it has been collected. Now we are compelled to climb up into the tree after the hardest fruit to reach.

So what are the instruments for breaking the bottom billion out of poverty? Collier offers four, and they are not without controversy.

• Aid
• Military Intervention
• Laws and Charters
• Trade Policy

We'll turn to these next.

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