I just read this very, very interesting essay written by Michael Clemens from the Center for Global Development. He reviews Paul Collier's new book The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.
Mr. Collier knows a lot about development and how to proceed to fight poverty and abjection. On other side, Clemens has made a great effort to critically summarise and analyse Collier's main points. According to the former, Collier seems to stuck in the middle between Sachs and Easterly's fightings (that is, between planners and searchers). Collier basically focuses its efforts towards that billion of people living in those developing countries economically stagnant and caught in any of the different poverty traps he considers: armed conflict, natural resource dependence, poor governance and geographic isolation. I haven't read the book yet, but after reading this essay, everybody interested in development should have a deep look at it. I really liked Clemens' conclusion:
Helping the bottom billion will be a very slow job for generations, not the
product of media- or summit-friendly plans to end poverty in ten or 20 years. It
will require long term, opportunistic, and humble engagement, much of it through
public action—built on a willingness to let ineffective interventions die and on
a sophisticated appreciation of the stupendous complexity of functioning
economies. The grievous truth is that although arrange of public actions can and
should help many people, most of the bottom billion will not—and cannot—be freed
from poverty in our lifetimes.
UPDATE: here, you can find Simon Maxwell's (Director of the Overseas Development Institute) opinions on the book.
It seems to be a must-to-have book!
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