The Bottom Billion, author: Paul Collier Publisher: Shanghai Joint Publishing Company

Introduction
Why is Africa mired in poverty despite its rich natural resources?
Why is Africa still lagging behind the world when opportunities of globalization come?
Why can't the international community's continued assistance help Africa out of the quagmire?
Crossing political and economic boundaries and combining solid research data
Explaining the trap that makes poor countries fail
★ Highly recommended by Bill Gates and Neil Ferguson, this is a classic work by the World Bank's chief expert on the root causes of poverty in Africa
The English version of this book was first published in 2008 and won praise from celebrities including Gates and Ferguson and countless media. The author was working at the World Bank when he wrote this book, which enabled him to think and explain the root causes of poverty in Africa from a comprehensive and macro perspective across political, economic and social boundaries.
★Using counterintuitive ideas and solid data research to explore the four underlying causes of poverty and backwardness in Africa
Abundant resources not only cannot help Africa get rid of poverty, but will make the problem worse; whether a country deep in the interior can become rich depends more on its neighbors than on its own factors... In this book, the author explains why Africa is trapped in poverty from four aspects: civil war, natural resources, geopolitical relations and national governance. His views may seem counterintuitive at first glance, but they are all supported by solid research data and rigorous logic.
「Content Introduction」
It is common knowledge that Africa is poor. In order to explain the problem of poverty, the author of this book, Paul Collier, proposed the concept of "the bottom billion people". Most of them live in countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Their social and economic development has been stagnant for a long time and there is no hope of improvement. In this book, Collier combines solid data with simple reasoning to analyze the four types of traps that restrict the sustainable development of these poor countries: conflict, natural resources, deep inland and surrounded by bad neighbors, and poor governance; whether these traps can be properly dealt with will determine the future fate of the bottom billion people.
It has been more than a decade since this book was published. According to the World Bank, nine of the ten countries with the lowest per capita GDP in the world in 2021 are from Africa; if we turn the clock back to 2007 when this book was published, seven of the ten poorest countries in the world were in Africa. At the same time, the problems caused by conflict, governance and natural resources have not been resolved, and population growth means that the number of people living at the bottom has far exceeded one billion - Africa is not only poor, but also getting poorer. Everything shows that reading Collier's book is not only still of profound practical significance to the world today, but also more urgent than ever.