Will the Bottom Billion Ever Catch Up?

It's feasible to get the bottom billion on a more prosperous track, but doing so will require a serious approach that utilizes all the instruments at our disposal -- and is sustained for at least two decades. Indeed, we will need the same toolkit we used in the recovery of postwar Europe: aid, trade, security and good governance, though utilized differently.

Aid will probably be more or less as important to helping the bottom billion as it was to saving postwar Europe: part of the solution but not decisive. The exclusive reliance on aid has distorted what should be institutions and energy devoted to development. Instead of development agencies, we have aid agencies. Instead of pressure from the street for development, we have pressure for aid.

The distortion of institutions and citizen pressure is self-perpetuating because it crowds out consideration of other approaches. (What, for example, do you imagine aid agencies lobby for?) Our utter neglect of trade, security and governance policies for the bottom billion is a scandal -- and an opportunity. Properly used, these policies have real power, which is why they were employed for the recovery of Europe. Zoellick and others who care about world poverty have to learn how to use the full array of policies, rather than pretending that it can all be done with aid.

Saving the bottom billion will also require the United States and Europe to work together. The emerging economies will need to do the same. To produce this unity of serious purpose, caring will not be enough: Goodness is in limited supply. Fortunately, it can be reinforced by the less morally demanding (and therefore better supplied) motivation of enlightened self-interest.

Moved as I am by the miseries of life at the bottom, I, too, have a self-interested stake here: I am fearful of the world that my 6-year-old son will inherit unless we wake up. The generation of Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower rose to the challenge of restoring Europe and gave us a safer world. Our own generation now has its own choice to make: whether to face up to our responsibilities or, like the generation of the 1930s, to go into collective denial and sleepwalk into a nightmare.

It isn't just about Zoellick. In our democracies, politicians will ultimately do what we ask of them. It is our collective responsibility to grasp the challenge posed by the bottom billion -- and, critically, to get up to speed with the issues to understand what can be done about it. Only then will our politicians move from gestures to serious, effective actions.

paul.collier@economics.ox.ac.uk

Paul Collier, a professor of economics at Oxford,

is the author of "The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can

Be Done About It."