The Plundered Planet and The Bottom Billion: Why
the mismanagement of nature matters for the world’s
most vulnerable
Paul Collier^22
he world’s most vulnerable
For over forty years the development challenge has been a
rich world of one billion people facing a poor world of fivebillion people. This way of conceptualizing development, however,
has become outdated, as about 80% of the five billion live in
countries that are indeed developing, often at amazing speed. The
real challenge of development is that there is a group of 58
countries, mostly in Africa and Central Asia that amount to a
population of about one billion people that is falling behind. Most
people in these countries are extremely vulnerable: average life
expectancy is fifty years, whereas in other developing countries it is
sixty-seven years; infant mortality is 14%, whereas in the other
developing countries it is four percent; the proportion of children
with symptoms of long-term malnutrition is 36%, against 20% for
other developing countries.
Causes of vulnerability
All societies used to be poor. Although most are now lifting out of
poverty, this group of countries has experienced either no or
negative economic growth, even during the 1990s, the golden age
between the end of the Cold War and 9/11. They have fallen into
development traps that have caused them to be stuck. Poverty itself
is not intrinsically a trap, otherwise we would all still be poor. The
(^22) Paul Collier is Professor of Economics, Director for the Centre for the Study of
African Economies at the University of Oxford and fellow of St. Antony’s
College