Four traps

From Popular Development Economics—An Anthropologist among the Mandarins by Mike McGovern. It is interesting that what has happened in the US is mirrored at the global level: The bottom quintile have stagnated in terms of their productivity at the same time that the top quintile have blossomed.

Collier’s argument starts from the finding that the bottom billion have stagnated over the past forty to fifty years while the other four billion people living in the “developing world” have not only achieved economic development but, in most cases, a greater degree of political stability. He identifies four “traps” that reinforce economic stasis, political instability, and each other. They are conflict, reliance on natural resources, being landlocked with bad neighbors, and bad governance.Having laid out these structural challenges, Collier uses the second half of The Bottom Billion to outline some possible solutions, including judicious use of development aid, postconflict international peacekeeping missions, revised international laws that would diminish the complicity of richer governments and their businesses in bad governance and conflict, and revising trade policy in a way that actively favors the poorest countries.