Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 224 pp., $28.00.

Fifty years ago this year, delegations from fifty-six countries arrived in Accra to witness the independence of the British crown colony of the Gold Coast as the new state of Ghana, the firstborn of what would soon be a veritable wave of nearly four dozen Sub-Saharan African nations which would achieve political independence in the coming years. The Duchess of Kent represented her niece, Queen Elizabeth II, while Vice President Richard Nixon stood in for President Dwight Eisenhower who broadcasted a special radio message to the Ghanaians on the birth date of their new country expressing his "particular admiration [for] the manner in which you attained your independence" and emphasizing that he spoke "for a people that cherishes independence, which we deeply believe is the right of all people who are able to discharge its responsibilities."

On March 6, 1957, few doubted that Ghana and the states which would follow in its wake would be able to discharge the responsibilities they assumed on taking their place among the world's sovereigns. As historian Martin Meredith has noted in his monumental history of post-colonial Africa, rarely are states launched with as much promise as the West African country:

Ghana embarked on independence as one of the richest tropical countries in the world, with an efficient civil service, an impartial judiciary and a prosperous middle class. Its parliament was well established, with able politicians in both government and opposition. The prime minister, himself, then only forty-seven years old, was regarded as a leader of outstanding ability, popularly elected, with six years of experience running a government. The country's economic prospects were equally propitious. Not only was Ghana the world's leading producer of cocoa, with huge foreign currency reserves built up during the 1950s cocoa boom, but it possessed gold, timber and bauxite.

Were one to have examined Ghana's economic indicators in comparison with those of, say, South Korea, the African nation evinced better prospects hands down. While the departing British governor, Sir Charles Arden-Clarke, bequeathed Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah an unprecedented $481 million in foreign reserves, South Korea's Syngman Rhee was presiding over a nearly bankrupt country eking out an existence on U.S. aid having not only endured the thirty-five years of brutal Japanese occupation, but subsequently suffered a devastating conventional war fought in its cities and countryside which concluded in a stalemate and armistice just four years earlier. In both aggregate and per capita terms, the gross domestic product of the Republic of Korea was lower than that of Ghana in 1957. Yet half a century later, South Korea boasts the world's 13^th largest economy and is considered "highly developed," ranking 26^th on the Human Development Index of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), while Ghana barely made the cut to qualify as a "medium developed" nation, ranking 136^th out of 177 countries surveyed. And even with its underwhelming economic performance, Ghana is far from the worst off among African nations

Why?

Paul Collier, director of the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University, author of The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, tries to provide an answer.

Collier's subtitle points to the object of his interest, the combined population of fifty-eight countries, most of whom are African, characterized by both low per capita incomes and lack of growth over the long term. His argument is that while for decades the question of development has been posed as one of "a rich world of one billion  people facing a poor world of five billion people," that conceptualization is now outdated because "most of the five billion, about 80 percent, live in countries that are indeed developing, often at amazing speed." In contrast, the ones who are falling behind and, Collier adds, "often falling apart"-for want of a convenient geographic label, he refers to the group as "Africa+," with the plus-sign referring to "places such as Haiti, Bolivia, the Central Asian countries, Laos, Cambodia, Yemen, Burma and North Korea"-require immediate attention because "as the bottom billion diverges from an increasingly sophisticated world economy, integration will become harder, not easier." Like many developing countries, the "Africa+" countries are poor. What distinguishes them is that they caught in one or more of four "traps."

The first trap is conflict, either in the form of civil war or coup d'état-or both in succession. Collier points out the nearly three quarters of the population of "Africa+" are either embroiled in a civil war or just getting over one. Turning around the work of those who study conflict as an impediment to growth, Collier proposes that differences in growth helped explain propensity to war: halving the starting income of a country doubles the risk of civil war. Furthermore, Collier found that not only did a typical low-income country faced a 14 percent risk of civil war in any five-year period, but each percentage point added to its growth rate decreased a percentage point from this risk, while each point knocked off the growth rate increased the risk by a point. Worse, if a civil war actually breaks out, it tends to reduce growth by around 2.3 percent per year, so that a "typical" seven-year conflict leaves the country affected about 15 percent poorer than it would have otherwise been. And once there is one civil war, there is a good chance another will follow in its wake: "Half of all civil wars are postconflict relapses," Collier observes. Take all these mathematical expectations together and one is forced to conclude that the future for a place like the rather ironically named Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire, formerly the Belgian Congo, formerly Leopold II's Congo Free State) is likely indeed to be as dismal as implied in the title of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. At its present rate of growth, the country will need at least half a century of peace just to get its income back to pre-independence levels. However, as Collier puts its rather clinically: "Its chances of getting fifty continuous years of peace with its low income, slow growth, dependence upon primary commodities, and history of conflict are, unfortunately, not high. This country is likely to be stuck in a conflict trap no matter how many times it rebrands itself."

Collier's second trap is the paradox of discovering valuable natural resources while poor. Rather than being a catalyst for development, the windfall might actually reduce economic growth and, in the end, leave the country poorer since the growth foregone may be greater the income from exports-and this even before one factors in the general volatility of the commodity markets on which resource-rich economies depend. In Nigeria, for example, the meteoric rise of the petroleum industry in the 1970s coincided with the equally spectacular collapse of the country's previously significant agricultural sector. As a result, the masses, which tend to be rural cultivators, end up being the first impoverished by the sudden increase in national wealth. According to Collier, the "resource curse" affects about one-third of the bottom billion.

The third trap is an illustration of why geography matters, to recall the title of Harm de Blij's recent volume. While being landlocked is no obstacle to prosperity-just ask the Swiss, Austrians, or Luxembourgers-it is not insignificant that nearly 40 percent of the people in the countries of "Africa+" reside in landlocked nations. Collier argues, "If you are landlocked with poor transportation links to the coast that are beyond your control, it is very difficult to integrate into global markets for any product that requires a lot of transport, so forget manufacturing-which to date has been the most reliable driver of rapid development." And neighbors are not just transport corridors to markets, but are themselves markets for countries in the interior. So the Swiss are surrounded by potential markets in Germany, Austria, Italy, and France, while the Ugandans are forced to make do with Kenya (stagnant for three decades), Tanzania (used twice in the last two decades as a staging area to invade Uganda), Rwanda (recovering from a genocide), the Democratic Republic of Congo (see above), and Sudan (in the midst of a campaign of genocidal violence in Darfur with a renewed civil war brewing in South Sudan).

If countries have little say as to their resource and geographical endowments, they certainly are responsible for their economic and governance policies which directly shape economic performance. And some three-quarters of the populations of "Africa+" have been subjected to a prolonged period of bad governance and poor economic policies. In a direct rebuke to Jeffrey Sachs, who recently took to the pages of a special Africa-focused issue of Vanity Fair-guest edited by Bono, no less-to brush off arguments about poor governance and corruption as a "convenient excuse to do nothing," Collier asserts that bad governance is indeed a trap since "terrible governance and policies can destroy an economy with alarming speed," adducing as his first exhibit President Robert Mugabe who "must take responsibility for the economic collapse in Zimbabwe since 1998, culminating in inflation of over 1,000 percent a year" (since The Bottom Billion went to press, the country's official annual inflation rate has soared above 7,600).

The cumulative probabilistic tally of the four traps is a dark tableau: left to their own devices, Collier's model estimates that the likelihood of any trapped country achieving a turnaround is less than 2 percent in any given year, thus predicting it that it will take about sixty years to decisively change some underdeveloped states. So what is to be done?

While he is careful to genuflect before the altar of conventional morality with its angst about the prosperity of the developed world, noting that "without aid, the countries of the bottom billion would be much poorer than they are today" and that "aid has been a holding operation preventing things from falling apart," Collier is intellectually independent enough to also acknowledge that assistance from abroad "is not the only answer to the problems of the bottom billion" and that if it has been overemphasized in recent years by American and European campaigners, it is "partly because it is the easiest thing for the Western world to do and partly because it so comfortably fits into a moral universe organized around the principles of sin and expiation." Even if it is part of the solution, he warns, "Alone it will not be sufficient to turn the societies of the bottom billion around."

Over the long term, trade offers an opportunity for Africa to leverage its comparative advantage of low labor costs as a step toward integrating into the global marketplace. Unfortunately, the continent has largely failed to seize the opportunity to diversify its economy into labor-intensive manufacturing. As a result, the more dynamic countries of Asia have used the last decades to create "economies of agglomeration," that is, massive concentration of export-driven manufacturing activities which lower costs of production to an extent that potential competitors find it difficult to enter the sector. Thus Collier endorses preferential tariff regimes like those adopted by the United States and the European Union through the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and Everything-But-Arms (EBA) initiatives, respectively, which have sought to temporarily give the African manufacturing sector an export advantage over its Asian competitors. Thanks to AGOA, for example, since 2001, Africa's garment exports to the United States have increased sevenfold.

Collier's book, like his proposals, has its limitations: the strength of its descriptive first part is not matched by its prescriptive second part. Especially with the latter, he paints with a broad brush and many will quibble with the particulars. In a critical lapse, he reposes great confidence in five proposed international charters to govern natural resource revenues, democracy, budget transparency, postconflict situations, and investment, without addressing the issue in international law: its enforceability. One might even be tempted to argue that Africa already suffers from a surfeit of conventions and protocols which its leaders are all too willing to sign with full knowledge that the likelihood that they will ever be called to account is almost nonexistent. Liberia's former ruler, Charles Taylor, may be facing an international court sitting at The Hague, but his wife Jewel, his son-in-law Edwin Snowe, and his former police chief Saah Gbollie are all still "Honorable Members" of the country's parliament.

And democracy is clearly no development tonic when democratically-elected governments like South Africa's entrust public health to regime cronies like health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who is best known for not only failing to expedite the release of antiretrovirals to those infected with HIV, but for questioning the efficacy of the drugs and exaggerating their side-effects, while simultaneously promoting the allegedly more efficacious curative benefits of beetroots, garlic and African potatoes. (Her Soviet medical degree aside, Tshabalala-Msimang's chief qualification for public office seems to be her husband Mendi Msimang's decade-long tenure as treasurer of the ruling African National Congress.)

One also has the impression that parts of The Bottom Billion were hastily cobbled together by one of Collier's student assistants-and not a particularly competent one at that. The text is periodically marred by howlers like the inclusion of Somalia among the states bordering on Uganda and the inexplicable conflation of General Robert Gueï's 1999 putsch in Côte d'Ivoire with the actions of the constitutional government of President Laurent Gbagbo following an unsuccessful coup attempt in 2002. These weaknesses, although regrettable, fortunately do not detract from what is, overall, a very engaging read, one rendered all the more pleasant because Collier is a scholar whose enviably deft prose is coupled refreshingly frank judgments (he skewers one British religious charity as afflicted with "headless heart" syndrome and calls nongovernmental organizations which spend donations opposing the reduction of African trade barriers a collection of "useful idiots").

In fact, the Achilles' heel of most development literature-including, to a certain extent, The Bottom Billion-is the virtual denial of the political dimensions of foreign assistance programs in favor of their technical and economic aspects as if all that was needed was to analyze certain facts, devise certain means, and perform certain functions. The problem of development aid, as Hans Morgenthau noted nearly four decades ago, "is soluble only if it is considered an integral part of the political polices if the donor country, which must be devised in terms of the political conditions, and for its effects upon the political situation, in the receiving country." He concluded that "it follows from the political nature of foreign aid that it is not a science but an art," one which, if it is to gather enough support to exist at all, must be "selectivity oriented toward the political advantage of the donor and, if feasible, the economic benefit of the recipient."

Fifty years after the beginning of the great period of African independence with the birth of Ghana in 1957, Sub-Saharan Africa remains sadly underdeveloped. While optimists assert that things have changed for the better and that the right conditions are present for new infusions of aid to be effective, there is little hard evidence that enough has changed by way of democratic governance, effective administration, sound economics, and transparent institutions that the increased transfers would achieve sustainable development. Of course, there have been some remarkable signs of progress and these certainly need to be recognized. In any event, it is improbable that, however disgusted they may be with the stolen, wasted, or simply ineffective aid given in the past, donor nations of the West and their voters would countenance significant reductions in aid, even if grandiose promises like those made by Tony Blair's heavily hyped Commission for Africa will also likely go unfulfilled.

For the foreseeable future, expectations for Africa will need to be modest, enthusiasm tempered by realism. Over time, the continent-aptly described by two scholars recently as "too long…a theater for Western ideologues' pet panaceas, with disastrous results for long-suffering Africans"-will require time to break free from its cycle of underdevelopment and poverty by unleashing the energy, talent, and enterprise long repressed by the regimes which are ultimately doomed to collapse under their own weight. Outsiders can only arm themselves with patience and seize such small opportunities as may arise in order to reward progress and punish regress, recognizing, as Collier wises does, that dragging the nations of "Africa+" out of the development doldrums is more than a generational undertaking for both the citizens of the countries involved and their international partners.

J. Peter Pham is director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University and author of the forthcoming Africa Matters (Yale University Press).