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Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the problems of the underdeveloped world, or more accurately, the group of countries who aren’t developing at all? Paul Collier has done more than identify the major issues – he’s identified some major, if controversial, solutions.

Poverty is actually reducing for about eighty percent of the world, explains Collier, Professor of Economics at Oxford University. It is only the bottom billion (of the world population of 6.6 billion), a group of around fifty failing states in Africa and central Asia, whose problems have defied traditional solutions.

Collier points to a set of traps that failing states fall into: civil war; dependence on oil or other natural resources; poor governance and landlocked with bad neighbours. Standard solutions don't work against these traps, he says, and can make matters worse. Aid is often ineffective, never reaching its intended destination or being diverted into the military which fuels the conflict trap. Globalisation, which would normally attract foreign investment, can also have the opposite effect with capital and talent flowing out of high risk unstable states, rather than in.

What the bottom billion need, he claims, is for the world community to support positive change and for a bold new plan from the G8 industrialized nations who will have to adopt preferential trade policies, new laws against corruption, and new international charters.

Collier acknowledges the contradictory views — ‘More Aid’ versus ‘Aid isn’t Working’ — in popular development economics and some of his advice, such as targeted military intervention, is controversial. But if you are interested in the problems of the world’s poorest, his work offers an optimistic view about the future.

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