The Bottom Billion Summary
Download The Bottom Billion Summary PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get The Bottom Billion Summary book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
The Bottom Billion
Author: Paul Collier
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 2007-05-25
In the universally acclaimed and award-winning The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier reveals that fifty failed states--home to the poorest one billion people on Earth--pose the central challenge of the developing world in the twenty-first century. The book shines much-needed light on this group of small nations, largely unnoticed by the industrialized West, that are dropping further and further behind the majority of the world's people, often falling into an absolute decline in living standards. A struggle rages within each of these nations between reformers and corrupt leaders--and the corrupt are winning. Collier analyzes the causes of failure, pointing to a set of traps that ensnare these countries, including civil war, a dependence on the extraction and export of natural resources, and bad governance. Standard solutions do not work, he writes; aid is often ineffective, and globalization can actually make matters worse, driving development to more stable nations. What the bottom billion need, Collier argues, is a bold new plan supported by the Group of Eight industrialized nations. If failed states are ever to be helped, the G8 will have to adopt preferential trade policies, new laws against corruption, new international charters, and even conduct carefully calibrated military interventions. Collier has spent a lifetime working to end global poverty. In The Bottom Billion, he offers real hope for solving one of the great humanitarian crises facing the world today. "Set to become a classic. Crammed with statistical nuggets and common sense, his book should be compulsory reading." --The Economist "If Sachs seems too saintly and Easterly too cynical, then Collier is the authentic old Africa hand: he knows the terrain and has a keen ear.... If you've ever found yourself on one side or the other of those arguments--and who hasn't?--then you simply must read this book." --Niall Ferguson, The New York Times Book Review "Rich in both analysis and recommendations.... Read this book. You will learn much you do not know. It will also change the way you look at the tragedy of persistent poverty in a world of plenty." --Financial Times
Summary of Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion
Author: Everest Media,
language: en
Publisher: Everest Media LLC
Release Date: 2022-06-11T22:59:00Z
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The third world has shrunk. For forty years, the development challenge has been a rich world of one billion people facing a poor world of five billion people. But the real challenge of development is that there is a group of countries at the bottom that are falling behind, and often falling apart. #2 There are some societies that have fallen into poverty, and they are an unlucky minority. But they are still stuck there, and their leaders are not willing to change their ways. #3 The concept of a development trap has been around for a long time. It refers to the consequences of malaria and other health problems, which keep countries poor. However, there are four traps that have received less attention: the conflict trap, the natural resources trap, the trap of being landlocked with bad neighbors, and the trap of bad governance in a small country. #4 There are 980 million people living in trapped countries as of 2006. Most are in Africa, and most Africans are living in countries that have been in one or another of the traps.
Quicklet on Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing (CliffsNotes-like Book Summary)
ABOUT THE BOOK “By 2050 the development gulf will no longer be between a rich billion in the most developed countries and five billion in the developing countries; rather, it will be between the trapped billion and the rest of humankind.” Written in 2007, Paul Collier’s, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, was widely hailed as a landmark work in the field of development economics. Intended in Collier’s own words as a book on economics that could be read on the beach (Collier, TED Talk), The Bottom Billion uses relatively simple descriptive prose to challenge traditional perspectives on the state of global poverty and what can be done about it. Based on years of statistical research, the Bottom Billion examines why some people and places in the world are seemingly stuck in poverty while the majority of ‘developing nations’ are rapidly becoming more affluent. Collier proposes several methods for helping the most impoverished nations to become ‘unstuck’. He emphasized four main ‘development traps’ that have often been overlooked in aid, economic, and foreign policy circles; notably, Collier questions current norms in provision of international aid to the poorest countries, suggesting strategic use of aid and asserting that more is not necessarily better. MEET THE AUTHOR Zeya is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area. After earning a BA in Modern Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Zeya began building a career in International Development work that allowed him to live and travel extensively in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. In 2011 he completed an MA in International Development from Oxford Brookes University in Oxford, England. EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK Collier estimates four of the five billion once stuck in poverty are now achieving greater levels of affluence and mobility. However, he argues the last billion—the bottom billion—are being left far behind. Not only is this demographic failing to achieve strong economic progress, says Collier, but in many cases it is regressing to a quality of existence more characteristic of the fourteenth century than the twenty-first. For fear of stigmatization, Collier declines to list the countries where the bottom billion live. He does comment the majority of those living in the most abject conditions are located within a group of some 58 states, mostly in Africa and Central Asia. Over the last several decades, four fifths of the world’s poor have made substantial gains towards a middle class lifestyle. Still, the average person in these bottom billion countries is now poorer than in 1970 and are statistically more susceptible to war and violent conflict, disease, environmental hazards, and corrupt governance. Many of the problems shared by these people are exacerbated by a lack of health care, education and other vital infrastructure... Buy a copy to keep reading!