The Bottom Billion
Falling Behind And Falling Apart
I’m currently have several books on the go, a rarity for me, and one of those I’m reading is Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion - a fascinating insight into global poverty. One of my best friends, now working at the Commonwealth Development Corporation, recommended it to me and it has proved so far to be extremely interesting and also very challenging. In the opening lines, Collier describes how the development challenge used to be a rich world of one billion facing a poor world of five billion; but that nowadays the situation we find ourselves in is of five billion people living in prosperity (or at least being on course to reach prosperity) and one billion people, in fifty failing states, who are stuck at the bottom. Though I can’t claim to be very far through it just yet, one quote from the chapter I read today really stuck me as to the gravity of the problems faced in creating change. To give it some context, Collier spends the first part of the book describing various traps that the world’s poorest countries find themselves in, citing statistics and examples, and giving suggestions as to how those traps might be overcome. For the “Landlocked with Bad Neighbours” trap, he writes:
Unfortunately, some neighbours are better as markets than others. Switzerland has Germany, Italy, France and Austria. Uganda has Kenya, which has been stagnant for nearly three decades; Sudan, which has been embroiled in a civil war; Rwanda, which has had a genocide; Somalia, which completely collapsed; the Democratic Republic of Congo, the history of which was sufficiently catastrophic for it to change its name from Zaire; and finally Tanzania, which invaded it. You could say that at least in recent decades Switzerland has been in the better neighbourhood.
Indeed. No doubt as I progress through the book there will be more insights that I’ll feel compelled to share on what is such an important issue. As Collier writes: “The problem matters, and not just to the billion people who are living and dying in fourteenth-century conditions. It matters to us… And it matters now.”
