However, he states that there are 58 such countries mentioned throughout the book. The book does not include a list of bottom billion countries because Collier believes this might lead to a "self-fulfilling prophecy". Trade Policy needs to encourage free trade and give preferential access to Bottom Billion exports.International Charters are needed to encourage good governance and provide prototypes.Appropriate Military Interventions (such as the British in Sierra Leone) should be encouraged, especially to guarantee democratic governments against coups.Ordinary citizens should not support poorly informed vociferous lobbies whose efforts are counterproductive and severely constrain what the Aid agencies can do. Aid agencies should increasingly be concentrated in the most difficult environments, accept more risk.He suggests a number of relatively inexpensive but institutionally difficult changes: The reason small countries are at a disadvantage is that though they may have a low cost-of-living, and therefore be ideal for labor-intensive work, their smallness discourages potential investors, who are unfamiliar with the local conditions and risks, who instead opt for better known countries like China and India. Landlocked countries with poor infrastructure connections to their neighbors therefore necessarily have a limited market for their goods.īad Governance in a Small Country: Terrible governance and policies can destroy an economy with alarming speed. Collier explains that countries with coastline trade with the world, while landlocked countries only trade with their neighbors. Landlocked with Bad Neighbours: Poor landlocked countries with poor neighbours find it almost impossible to tap into world economic growth. The exploitation of valuable natural resources can result in Dutch disease, where a country's other industries become less competitive as a result of currency valuation due to the revenue raised from the resource.Consequently, the citizenry are less likely to demand financial accountability from the government. Natural resources mean that a government does not have to tax its citizens.Resources make conflict for the resources nearly inevitable due to the lack of transparency provided by government officials who often use surpluses of natural resources for their own benefit.Collier attributes this to a variety of causes: The Natural Resource Trap: Countries that are rich in natural resources are paradoxically usually worse off than countries that are not. Collier also argues that the longer a country stays in a state of conflict, the more players become established that profit from the state of tumult, making the situation increasingly intractable. Additionally, in the time period immediately following a major conflict, relapse is highly likely. The Conflict Trap: Civil wars (with an estimated average cost of $64bn each ) and coups incur large economic costs to a country. These countries typically suffer from one or more development traps. The book suggests that, whereas the majority of the 5 billion people in the "developing world" are getting richer at an unprecedented rate, a group of countries (mostly in Africa and Central Asia but with a smattering elsewhere) are stuck and that development assistance should be focused heavily on them. On his reckoning, there are just under 60 such economies, home to almost 1 billion people. In the book Collier argues that there are many countries whose residents have experienced little, if any, income growth over the 1980s and 1990s. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It is a 2007 book by Paul Collier, Professor of Economics at Oxford University, exploring the reasons why impoverished countries fail to progress despite international aid and support.
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