Introduction
This paper will explain the book The Bottom Billion: why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it written by Paul Collier. The paper will analyse the book’s basic premises and will explain how the book relates to the role of the US Government, its citizens, policies and culture in the world and will discuss whether the book has any importance for the United States as a whole. The paper will look at the role that the United States plays - culturally, politically, socially, economically or militarily – in the subject matter or storyline of the book. The thesis statement is to discuss what lessons about the modern world should Americans take from the book.
The main premise of The Bottom Billion is that the focus of development attention should be on the sixty poor states whose economies are not growing, including many countries in African and central Asia, and which have not been growing for the previous few decades (Leonard and Haddad, 2008). As Collier (2007) argues, countries that have had economic and development problems in the past, such as India, are now growing at such a pace that they should, in future, be able to solve their own poverty problems (Leonard and Haddad, 2008). As Collier (2007) argues, the ‘Bottom Billion’ states are trapped in a series of traps, including conflict, natural resources, inadequate access to global markets and poor governance, all of which mean that they will need help to escape these problems (Leonard and Haddad, 2008).
Collier (2007) argues that in order to solve the problems of these countries, there will need to be new approaches to trade and development and a new regime of international laws and charters: he argues that reforms in the developed countries such as the United States and European member states could help these countries. As The Bottom Billion argues, the problem goes beyond a lack of money in these countries – these countries will not ever be able to develop economically if they are not provided with economic and political stability (Collier, 2007). Collier (2007) argues that in order to help these countries, it will be necessary to change the way that aid agencies work, in that they should shift their focus to work in these sixty states, should work in the more difficult places first and should accept more risk in their day-to-day operations, as part and parcel of the job they have set out to do.
Collier (2007) argues that it is necessary to provide military interventions, in order to end the conflicts in some of these sixty states, as the conflict keeps the state in a situation that blocks economic development and which, eventually, leads to perpetual conflict as the actors in the conflict come to profit from the conflict. Collier (2007) argues that military interventions by the United States or European member states would end the conflicts in these states and would enable the development of democratic governance in these states, which would lead to economic development.
As to what, politically and economically, the United States could do to help these states that Collier (2007) argues need help, the book suggests that protectionist policies could help African states in particular, in terms of lower tariffs on African imports than those tariffs levied goods imported from Asia. Collier (2007) argues that economic charters are needed that would enable good governance and provide samples of how business should be undertaken. In addition, the book argues that free trade agreements would help the sixty states to build their export businesses, specialising in local products that are attractive to an international market and not currently found on the international market (Collier, 2007). As Easterly (2007) argues, in order to really help the poor, what is needed is piecemeal problem-solving, enabling individuals living in poverty in these sixty failing states to set up their own businesses and, through this, lift themselves out of poverty.
Collier (2007) argues that, actually, what has happened in the poorest sixty countries is that those nationals who have skills have fled their countries, moving abroad for the chance of a better life. What needs to happen, therefore, in these countries, in order to enable economic development, is capacity building. Collier (2007) argues that some portion of aid should be allocated to this capacity building: without this, he argues, the country will continue to fail, even after it’s main problems have been solved. In this sense, Collier (2007) argues that aid should be provided via some type of ‘venture aid fund’: an aid fund set up, specifically, to build capacity and to equip entrepreneurs in these countries with the funding they need to set up businesses to generate employment.
As to the books relevance to the United States, the United States is one of the world’s major donors of aid and so the suggestions in this book are very relevant to the policy makers who decide where the United States aid money goes. Military intervention could enable decades long conflicts to be resolved and could ensure the development of stable, democratic, governance. This would mean that the aid money could be put to much better use, harnessing economic potential and not supporting for conflict (in Colombia, for example, as Velliette (2005) discusses, the vast majority of aid money from the United States goes towards supporting the armed conflict, not building capacity or enabling economically stable developments). Political and economic reforms, argues Collier (2007) could help to pull these states out of poverty, making a difference to billions of lives (Heather, 2007). Opening up trade routes, for example, would allow imports from these failing states, developing the economies of these states and offering the states a chance to develop economically (Ortiz and Cummins, 2007).
In terms of what lessons about the modern world Americans should take from the book, Americans are a closed minded people, in general: as long as they are happy, it doesn’t matter whether the rest of the world is not. What Collier (2007) suggests is that, as the United States Government is already committed to dishing out aid, if a revised framework was put in place, based on the actual needs of these sixty failing states, this aid money could actually be put to use. What Collier (2007) calls for is a revision of how aid money, and support, should be provided to these failing states: if the situation continues as it is, these states will continue in to their downward spiral, falling even further behind the rest of the world and condemning their inhabitants to yet more inter-generational poverty traps. Americans need to listen to Collier’s lessons, even if for nothing more than to ensure that their own aid money is no longer wasted on ineffective plans that do little more than perpetuate the problems it attempts to solve.
References
Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
William B. Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: why Western efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good. (London: Penguin Books, 2007).
Leonard, D. and Haddad, L. (2008). Assessing the policy prescriptions in The Bottom Billion. IDS In Focus 3. Available from http://www.fes.de/cotonou/DocumentsEN/ThematicFocus/Crosscutting_Issues/TheBottomBillion_PaulCollier.pdf [Accessed 4th November 2012].
Isabel Ortiz and Michael Cummins, Global inequality: beyond the bottom billion. UNICEF, November 2012, http://www.unicef.org/socialpolicy/files/Global_Inequality.pdf
Heather Stewart, Action will speak louder than words. The Guardian 10th June 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jun/10/politics
Claudette Veillette, Plan Colombia: a progress report. CRS Report for Congress, 4th November 2012, http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL32774.pdf
