Paul Collier is an economist.

That is why, where we talk about alleviating poverty and helping the bottom billion, the only feasible solution suggested seems to be about natural resource and monetary related. The book virtually told how to improve economic growth. According to him, no growth gets these countries no where. The world has changed, and is constantly evolving. It does not work to use the model of asian countries to apply to the africans. Time has changes, human rights have been realized. Environmental concerns and depletion of resources. He said that the market economy has worked for the Asia and the Marxist did not want to admit it. Asia has a very different dynamic, number of populations and environment than the Africans. The problem is not African has missed the boat, but there is never one for Africa. And the one for Asians, has come with lots of sacrifices. Many have suffered extremely low income long hour exploitation, get crammed in a sub living standard and tiny spaces, and environmental and health pollutions. Now that they are getting those growth, the inequality is everlarging. Collier's statistics, though inaccurate, are not even a measure of poverty to begin with. Any index of poverty would have shown that global poverty has increased during his "golden age" of globalization. His economic proposals represent a continuation of the neoliberal structural adjustment programs instituted by the IMF during the 1980s and 1990s, programs that have proved disastrous for the countries that have instituted them. (Samuel Grove) Collier tacitly accepts that his proposals would be met with resistance, he therefore passes the responsibility for implementation to the countries of the G8. He also proposes that the West, led by the US and Britain, vastly expand its military presence in Africa. In making this case he paints an extremely distorted picture of Britain and the US's post-war record. Unfortunately we must take Collier's grim proposals seriously as the agenda he lays out is a part of a wider imperial project to lock Africa into the US sphere away from the looming presence of China. Dead Aid, on the other hand, favours china all come down to political game in the expense of the bottom billion!!!!!! Collier's globalization statistics rely upon the two countries that have resisted neoliberalism.42 To illustrate just how reliant he is, in 1980 India and China accounted for 12% of total developing country income. By 2000 it was 30%.43 It is misleading to incorporate India and China into statistics measuring the effects of neoliberalism. To compound this initial confusion by factoring India and China's enormous populations into the equation renders his statistics virtually meaningless. In fact this is only the beginning of Collier's distortions. He lookes at the issue much as an economist, rather than a human. Behind figures and growth there is nobody (quoted from Obi). When we talk about bottom billion, the most urgent thing is to fulfil their basic need: food, water, security and health (free of diseases), and then education for themselves to lift them out of the current condition. Paul Collier looks very much from the country perspective, how aid, security, governance and trade can help a country to grow, to have a higher GDP. But whether those GDP translate into human development is hardly addressed at all. It is important to remember that economic growth is a mean towards human well being. The ultimate goal of development is to have well-being, which are health and environment. (hans rosling). It is outdated to think that development of the bottom billion has to come from economic growth, and then wait for another centuries for it to trickle down till the very bottom of the society, which has not yet happened in Asia. Many people still living in terrible conditions despite the prosperous growth. It would just take too long and overburden

the environment, human rights and resources for that to happen. GDP per capita is simply not a poverty index. It is axiomatic that GDP measures economic activity within a country, not the income of it citizens. Therefore it is possible (and even common) for a country's GDP to go up, but for the standard of living of the majority of its citizens to go down. This is as true for advanced industrial countries as it is for the poorest countries.44 This is indeed what has been happening in almost all of Collier's "middle income" countries and even includes the economic miracle that is India. (samuel groove) Why dont we follow the Kerala model? Why dont we start talking about transforming economic growth immediately into social growth? When the first world start to realize the importance of self sufficiency, he is talking about developing infrastructure to export is the only ways. why do we want the africans to go through all the wrong paths taken, all the way round again to achieve what is happening in developed country. One very crucial thing not addressed is the limited resources of the world. No matter how transformed or digital our society become, our food, wear, shelter and basic amenities come from natural resource. The constant demand and acquire of access of resources by one society will continue to deprive the other one from it. What paul collier suggest is, african can only growth when they are being exploited as cheap labours, to satisfy the need and or the richer world. Does that sound sensible? Are we talking about human??? Change of lifestyle change of market economy technology transfer let them know, teach them skills for manufacturing using their own natural resources so that they can either export to import some other needs, or use them themselves for their daily comfort, let them pick up knowledge based jobs. Stop thinking from monetary point of view. If you have the goods, the technology to process it, the knowledge, the health and the education, you dont need money, or so called economic growth. It is a mean, not an end. And this would increase competition of africa towards western country, they can no more import cheap comodities and sell high technology, they want profit, it is market economy, thats why it is never going to happen. education civil society movement I am not saying this is not a complex problem, what I am saying is these all amount to the selfishness of developed country, thinking the others deserve misery to serve them. Among all the global issues, it is not hard to see tht capitalism is the problem. Depletion of resources is due to market economy that encourage prosperity the high consumption and therefore wastage. Mass production of products sometimes unneccessarily, too luxurious comfort of life that compromise on our daily health and environmental consequences. And the ever larging inequality, is market the answer?

The global annual flow of money from the south to the north is larger than the opposite. Is it not a problem over there? Stop thinking we are financing the south, they are financing us. Thats y we dont have to backbreak too hard to have food, shelter and rather comfortable life. Is it merely because we have good governance and education? How does material come in without natural resources and labour? Paul collier is a much easier accepted version than the current reality. We need a mental revolution, believe it or not. If not, everything is not going to be sustainable. By the time all asians reach europeans status, the earth is not able to support anymore and things would be deplted. Of course I would not disagree that technology can overcome it. But we are talking about humanity, stop imagining the far future, if we can stop this now. And we can, by having this mental revolution. Understanding that it is not our right to use more resources than we can. Its not our right to buy cheap comodities due to someone else suffering and backbreaking I will probably be criticized of being unrealistic and not being able to accepted in this argument. People always think things are impossible. Just like arab spring is impossible, iphone and Ipad too. If all people can reach consencus, it can happen. Aand I would like to propagate that. nstances like this can be multiplied ad nauseum. Take the Democratic Republic of Congo. Canadian negotiators recently convinced the DRC government to barter away mineral concessions worth some $120 billion to China in exchange for a paltry $6 billion of infrastructural development. Why are the Congolese people so desperately poor when they're literally sitting on a goldmine? Because -- as in the days of old European colonialism -- their mineral profits are being siphoned by first-world corporations that can get away without paying them the real price of the commodities they extract or the labor that digs them up. Africans don't need aid, they need fairer trade arrangements. (jason hickle)