Book Reports 1 & 2: On Development

Recently I read two books on development, and before I forget much of what I read, I think I ought to write a review on each of them.

First I read The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier. His book chronicled his seemingly exhaustive research on correlations between the countries with the most extreme poverty. Of the main risk factors for extreme poverty, being landlocked, having recently experienced conflict, and being a single commodity exporter (like oil or diamonds for example) all seemed to me to be the most important.

Overall, I thought the book was informative, but not inspiring. In fact, his tone seems to be pretty pessimistic. He believes that the extreme growth in Asia in the past couple decades was due to, not only their access to ports, but also their labor price advantage compared to previous labor markets. His diagnosis therefore is that countries in Africa do not have comparative advantages to Asia and cannot expect similar growth even if their countries could be stabilized and infrastructure built to ports in other countries.

In the end, much of his research is convincing. The problem though is that I don't feel much urgency in his voice. On top of that, his only focus is how to improve growth. This is something we should work towards, but with so many people facing such extreme crises, I think we need to focus on improving short term efforts to alleviate suffering while we wait for their economies to expand.

More recently I read The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs. Although he also recommends increasing growth, Sachs is inspiring and impatient. He thinks we can end extreme poverty in our generation as long as we actually follow through on promises we have already made - namely 0.7% of GDP for foreign assistance.

His proscriptions are extremely thorough, and you only wish the world would follow through. Looking at the landscape of current development movements, it seems as though at least two of his biggest recommendations are being acted on; help fighting malaria (including work on vaccines, increasing availability of bed nets, and better access to treatment), AIDS, and tropical diseases as well as debt forgiveness (he does a great job of showing why this is so important) are big issues right now. With any luck, two of his other big recommendations - drastically improving infrastructure so that landlocked countries can have access to ports and increasing agriculture production - are hopefully not far behind (and this article on Malawi shows how one country has made strides on this last point).

Overall, his analysis is even more convincing than Collier's. The countries that still experience extreme poverty do so because of tropical diseases, food scarcity caused by low agriculture output, and lack of access to ports. Each of these things can be corrected. And he really reinforces the reality that in a world with as much wealth as there is, extreme poverty is unacceptable.

Between the two books, there are some valuable lessons to take away. From Paul Collier, I have been further convinced that we need to be more involved to permanently end conflicts. Places like Somalia, Congo, and Afghanistan continue to fall back into conflict in another form of poverty trap (and in each of these countries, they risk pulling their neighbors back into those traps as well). Ending this poverty trap is one step to improving the lives of those caught in patterns of famine and disease. Both Collier and Sachs talk about the problems facing landlocked countries - and infrastructure and inter-country agreements can help with some of that. And finally, improving health and food production are extremely important.