Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. My guest today is Paul Collier, Professor of Economics at Oxford University,

Director of the Center for the Study of African Economies, and the author of the bottom billion

why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it. Paul, welcome to Econ Talk.

Thanks very much for inviting me. Who are the bottom billion and where are they? Well, they're a group

of countries which add up to about a billion people. They're nearly 60 of them. They're drawn

from all the regions of the world, but they're disproportionately drawn from Africa, about 70% of the

bottom billion people are living in Africa. And the distinctive feature of these 60 odd countries

is that, for various reasons, they've failed to grow over the periods since their independence.

Most developing countries have grown, and for one reason, rather, these miss the boat. And so,

the overarching characteristic of them is of economic stagnation. And there's, as you say,

there's about 60. And these bottom billion folks aren't just 60 nations where these people are

found, and these folks aren't just not doing as well as others. They are not doing as well as

others, but it's not just their relative station that we're talking about. It's the absolute situation

they're in. In absolute poverty, some of them have actually been in decline, but I do think

that the key feature is really one of divergence from the rest of mankind. And even if we

dismiss the billion rich folk in the world, the people like you and me who are living in

countries that have already sort of made it to high income level, and that is a billion people,

if we just compare the billion at the bottom with the four billion people living in other developing

...