When it comes to war-torn countries, Rwanda, Congo, Somalia and Sudan are some examples that fall into this category. So how does a country fall within the bottom billion group? The answer to this is multidimensional and lies in what Collier terms as “poverty traps.” According to Collier, these poverty traps include conflict, being landlocked, abundant natural resources and bad governance. These countries are among the poorest in the category of “developing countries or Third World countries.” Some of the countries in the bottom billion include Rwanda, Congo, Sudan, Chad, Somalia and Ethiopia. Most of the bottom billion live in 58 countries, 70 percent of which are in Africa and most of the rest, in Central Asia. For instance, during the 90s, while globalization lifted millions out of poverty in China and India, the income of the bottom billion “actually fell by 5 percent.” According to Paul Collier, a professor of economics at Oxford University and the author of “The Bottom Billion,” a book about the poorest one billion people in the world, “the countries at the bottom billion coexist with the 21st century, but their reality is the 14th century: civil war, plague, ignorance.”Ĭountries and their citizens in the bottom billion find their conditions getting worse, not better.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |