This slip of a book is set to become a classic of the “how to help the world's poorest” genre. Its author, Paul Collier, an Oxford economics professor, has spent 30-odd years puzzling mainly over sub-Saharan Africa and trying to work out why so many of its 48 countries have become basket cases. Crammed with statistical nuggets and common sense, his book should be compulsory reading for anyone embroiled in the hitherto thankless business of trying to pull people out of the pit of poverty where the “bottom billion” of the world's population of 6.6 billion seem irredeemably stuck.
Mr Collier reckons that most of the bottom billion live in 58 countries, 70% of them in Africa and most of the rest in Central Asia. Since the 1990s, more than 4 billion people in the poor world have begun to move out of the depths of poverty, some of them very fast. But the countries where the poorest live have barely grown at all since the 1970s.
Most of them are caught, as Mr Collier describes it, in one or more of four traps: wars, in which 73% of the poorest have been caught at one time or another; natural resources gone wrong (think of Nigeria and its oil), which accounts for about 30%; landlocked with bad neighbours (look at Chad); and the bad-governance-in-a-small-country trap (too many to name).
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