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Reviewed by John O'Shea, The Sunday Business Post, 8th July 2007
THE BOTTOM BILLION, By Paul Collier, Oxford University Press, €25.15.
Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion is a welcome addition to the all-too-scarce set of sensible, well researched and rational books on the real reasons so many people on this earth remain desperately poor, and what we can do to help.
It is generally accepted that, of the six billion people in the world, only one billion live in prosperity.
The other five billion live in the ‘developing world’. In this book, Collier asserts that one billion of those now live in countries that are stagnating or, in some circumstances, moving backwards.
Collier also provides confirmation that corruption is the biggest impediment to the development of the world’s poorest countries.
It is so deeply embedded in every aspect of life throughout the developing world, it is difficult to envisage how these economies can move forward.
The book is flush with compelling and relevant anecdotes and facts, some of which are chilling in their scale. In Chad, for example, a 2004 survey tracked money released by its Ministry of Finance for rural health clinics. Unbelievably, only 1 per cent of that funding reached its destination.
In another example, Collier outlines the sheer ineptitude of some Third World governments and the west’s unwillingness to engage with them constructively.
He writes that the government of Kenya promised the same reform to the World Bank in return for aid five times over a 15-year period.
‘‘The amazing thing is that the money kept coming. How did Kenyan government officials manage to keep straight, sincere faces as, for the fifth time, they made the same commitment? How did officials of the agency manage to delude themselves into thinking that adherence this time was likely?”
Despite dipping a little too heavily into jargon in places, when it gets it right, the Bottom Billion is an excellent guide to the problems facing the world’s poorest people.
Recognising that the reasons the world’s poorest countries are failing so miserably, even as the five billion people in the middle are raised slowly from the doldrums, Collier offers sound, if somewhat radical, advice on what can be done to make sure no one is left behind.
Aid in its current form is not perfect and Collier is not the first to recognise this. Aid is unlikely, he suggests, to be enough to address the problems of the bottom billion, because it has ‘‘become so highly politicised that its design is often pretty dysfunctional’’.
However, he also notes that aid work has, on average, added about 1 per cent of annual growth to the economies of the bottom billion over the past few decades.
This might not seem like much at first glance but, when a country’s economy would otherwise not have grown at all – or may even have contracted - the figure marks a tangible difference indeed.
Given that, Collier estimates that ‘‘something around 40 per cent of Africa’s military spending is inadvertently financed by aid’’ - most of it through no-questions-asked bilateral funding from our governments and international organisations into the coffers of disdainful and hawkish governments.
The author repeatedly highlights the paradox of development that it is often the world’s most resource-rich nations that face the lowest levels of development and economic success.
The reason, as he sees it, tells us a lot about the psyches of these rulers: they radically reduce the need to tax.
‘‘Because resource-rich countries do not need to tax, they do not provoke citizens into supplying the public good of scrutiny over how their taxes are being spent,” he writes.
‘‘The leaders of many of the poorest countries in the world are themselves among the global superrich. They like things the way they are, and so it pays to keep their citizens uneducated and ill-informed. Unfortunately, many of the politicians and senior public officials in the countries of the bottom billion are villains.”
This is why ‘budgetary support’ - a phrase used by donors to describe the lazy and morally bankrupt process of handing aid money over without stipulations or conditions - is an inexcusable tactic to assuage our need to give away as much aid money as we can.
For years, the Irish government had been giving ‘budgetary support’ to some of Africa’s vilest regimes. But, after a lot of pressure in the cases of Uganda and Ethiopia, they have learned that this is no longer acceptable.
The Bottom Billion is a fascinating account of the multifarious ways a country can be left behind and a stirring order to the world’s people - both rich and poor - to attempt some new course of action against it.
‘‘For our future world to be liveable, the heroes must win their struggle,” Collier writes. ‘‘But the villains have the guns and the money, and to date they have usually prevailed. That will continue unless we radical ly change our approach.” A compelling read.
John O’Shea is founder and chief executive of GOAL, an international humanitarian organisation
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