Four Traps:
1. The Conflict Trap
2. The Natural Resource
Trap
3. Landlocked with Bad
Neighbors
4. Bad Governance in a
Small Country
Renamed Malawi, it was
the poorest country on the continent. It is easier to rename countries than to
change them: thirty five years later it is still as dirt poor as it was then.
In another thirty five years I doubt it will be much different, unless… This
book is about that “unless.”
The countries now at
the bottom is not just are distinctive not just in being the poorest but also
in having failed to grow. They are not following the development path of most
other nations: they are adrift. As
once poor India and China and countries like them, surged ahead, the global
poverty picture has been confused, concealing this divergent pattern. Of course
for some countries to do relatively better, others must do relatively worse.
But the decline of the countries now at the bottom is not just relative; often
it is absolute. Many of these countries
are not just falling behind, they are failing apart.
For the past few years
much of my work has been on civil war. I wanted to understand why conflict was
increasingly concentrated in low income Africa. Gradually, I developed the
notion of the “conflict trap.” It shows how certain economic conditions can
make a country prone to civil war and how, once conflict has started, the cycle
of violence becomes a trap from which is difficult to escape. I realized that
the conflict trap was one explanation for the countries at the bottom of the
world economy. But it is not the whole story…
We have in fact done
the easier part of global developed; finishing the job now gets more difficult.
Finish it we must, because an impoverished ghetto of one billion people will be
increasingly impossible for a comfortable world to tolerate.
Unfortunately, it is
not just about giving these are not that many of them. With some important
exceptions, aid does not work so well in these environments, at least as it has
been provided in the past. Change in the
societies at the bottom must come predominantly from within; we cannot impose
it on them. In all these societies there do struggles between brave people want
change and entrenched interests opposing it. To date, we have largely bystanders
in this struggle. We can do much more to strengthen the hand of reformers. But
to do so we will need to draw upon tools- such as military interventions,
international standard-setting, and trade policy-that to date have been used
for other purposes. The agencies that control these instruments have neither
knowledge of nor interest in the problems of the bottom billion. They will need
to learn, and the governments will need to learn how to coordinate this wide
range of policies.
The ideas open horizons
across the political divide. The left will find that approaches it has
discounted, such as military interventions, trade, and encouraging growth, are
critical means to the ends it has long embraced. The right will find that,
unlike the challenge of global poverty reduction, the problem of the bottom
billion will not be fixed automatically by global growth, and that neglect now
will become a security nightmare for the world of our children. We can crack
this problem; indeed we must. But to do so, we need to build a unity of
purpose.
To build a unity of purpose, thinking needs to
change, not just within the development agencies but among the wider
electorates whose views shape what is possible. Without an informed electorate, politicians will
continue to use the bottom billion merely photo opportunities rather than
promoting real transformation.
Research is often like
a quest. You start with a question that sounds impossible to answer: how much
aid leaks into military spending, or how much Africa’s wealth has fled the
continent. How would you go about answering those questions? Ask each third
world army where it got its money? Knock on the doors of the Swiss banks and
ask them to report their African accounts? There is a different way of getting
to the answers, and it is statistical. This stand in contrast to crude image
that often provide us with what we think we know about the world. For rebellion as an example, the image is
often Che Guevara, ubiquitous in my generations as a poster on student walls.
The poster did our thinking for us. Our notions about the problems of the
problems of the poorest countries are saturated with such images: not just of
noble rebels but of starving children, heartless businesses, crooked
politicians. You are held prisoner by these images. While you are held
prisoner, so are our politicians. Because they do what you want. I am going
to take you beyond images. Sometimes I am going to smash them. And my image
smasher is statistical evidence.
This book is the big picture that emerges when you
connect the dots. But the dots are a story in themselves. Although this is not a book about research, I hope
that along the way you will get some of the flavor of how modern research is
done and a sense of the thrill that comes from cracking intractable questions…
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