Unfortunately, the debate on what the G8 should do has been entirely dominated by aid. Most of these countries are in Africa, and so it is appropriate that the region should again have been on the Group of Eight (G8) agenda at the summit in Heiligendamm, Germany on 6-8 June 2007. It will also change the way you look at the tragedy of persistent poverty in a world of plenty.Since the 1960s countries with around a billion people have been diverging from the rest of the world at an accelerating rate, a trend which will generate unmanageable social pressures. 'Rich in both analysis and recommendations. Niall Ferguson, The New York Times Book Review 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.' '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.

Crammed with statistical nuggets and common sense, his book should be compulsory reading.' In The Bottom Billion, he offers real hope for solving one of the great humanitarian crises facing the world today. Collier has spent a lifetime working to end global poverty. 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.

What the bottom billion need, Collier argues, is a bold new plan supported by the Group of Eight industrialized nations. Standard solutions do not work, he writes aid is often ineffective, and globalization can actually make matters worse, driving development to more stable nations. 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. A struggle rages within each of these nations between reformers and corrupt leaders-and the corrupt are winning. 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. 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 bottom billion review