Paul Collier's last book but one, The Bottom Billion, is one of the more thoughtful books I've read on the complex of reasons for the lack of economic growth in so much of Africa. His latest, Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places, focuses on conflict as the root cause. He has taken up the theme of the need for others – donors, world powers – to tackle conflict first, in a provocative essay in The Boston Review. The magazine has also published a number of responses, many supportive, others more critical. This debate is well worth a read.

In particular, another of my economist heroes, Bill Easterly, criticizes Collier's approach as essentially neo-colonialist – or actually, plain old-fashioned colonialist. The debate is well worth a read. After a bit of pondering, combined with having read Richard Dowden's Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles  this past week (a review will follow on this blog), I've ended up on the Easterly side of the argument. The bit of his critique that swung it for me concerns Collier's statistical conclusions:

“The logical fallacy leads to the conclusion that the poorest
countries systematically fall behind everybody else in economic growth.
Of course they do! Collier selected countries that were on the bottom
at the end of a specific period, so naturally they would be
more likely to have had among the worst growth rates in the world over
the preceding period. This ex post selection bias makes the test of
poor-country divergence invalid. The correct test would be to see who
is poor at the beginning of the period and then see if they have worse
growth than richer countries in the following years. When the test is
run this way, there is no evidence that poor countries grow more slowly
than richer countries.”

I think this debate will run on, however, especially after President Obama's strong speech in Ghana.