He has shown clearly what is happening to the poorest billion in the world, why it is happening and what can be done to open up greater opportunities for them in a world of increasing wealth. If you don't care, read it anyway.'-Tim Harford, Financial Times columnist and author of The Undercover Economist 'Paul Collier's book is of great importance. If you care about the fate of the poorest people in the world, and want to understand what can be done to help them, read it. His analyses and proposals-delivered, by the way, in prose unusually good for an author who happens to be an economist-are sound and should be embraced by people who care and can do something about the poorest of the world.' -Ernesto Zedillo, former president of Mexico and director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization 'This is an arresting, provocative book, written by an expert in plain English. 'One of the most engaging and provocative books on development to appear in a long time. In The Bottom Billion, he offers real hope for solving one of the great humanitarian crises facing the world today. As former director of research for the World Bank and current Director of the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University, Paul Collier has spent a lifetime working to endglobal poverty. If failed states are ever to be helped, the G8 will have to adopt preferential trade policies, new laws against corruption, and 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 against these traps, 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 snare 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 nation between reformers and corrupt leaders-and the corrupt are winning.

The book shines a 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 Bottom Billion, Collier contends that these fifty failed states pose the central challenge of the developing world in the twenty-first century.

The real crisis lies in a group of about 50 failing states, the bottom billion, whose problems defy traditional approaches to alleviating poverty. Global poverty, Paul Collier points out, is actually falling quite rapidly for about eighty percent of the world.

The bottom billion