The trajectory of much of sub-Saharan Africa over the past thirty years has been a standing rebuke to advocates of the free-market Washington Consensus. Successive waves of structural adjustment programmes, international conflict mediation, good-governance monitoring and the best efforts of numerous western-funded ngos appear to have done nothing to halt rural crisis, ethnic conflicts and spreading shanty towns. In the eyes of many critics, they have merely exacerbated the situation. Along with the impoverished narco-economies of Central America, the blight-struck ex-Soviet republics and the sprawling slums of Cairo, Kolkata or Jakarta, this is where globalization has most visibly piled up misery and destitution, just as it has accumulated undreamt-of wealth in Manhattan or Mayfair.

The popularizing works of Paul Collier—first The Bottom Billion and now Wars, Guns and Votes—are a robust rejoinder to such views . Collier is a former Director of Development Research at the World Bank and currently runs the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford. His research teams make use of the most advanced econometric techniques to identify the factors causing states to ‘fail’ and the policies that could make them succeed. Their diagnoses are based on sophisticated statistical analyses of a wide array of datasets, and Collier’s policy propositions are presented as logical deductions from them. He has some trenchant criticisms of World Bank and imf practice, above all their apparent fetishization of elections and too-rapid departure from post-conflict situations. He is unrelenting in his blasts against the greed and corruption of the local ‘villains’, who have blighted the development of the poorest countries in Africa and elsewhere; and even more so of Western critics of free trade—Christian Aid, apparently ‘infiltrated by Marxists’, comes in for particular lambasting in The Bottom Billion. On the other hand, there is genuine warmth in his praise for the few ‘heroes’—generally us-educated finance ministers and central bankers, such as Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo Iweala and Charles Soludo, or Ghana’s Kwesi Botchwey—who have followed responsible paths of ‘economic reform’. His books aim to garner popular support for econometric techniques, as applied to such intractable problems as world poverty and endemic conflict, as well as his preferred policy solutions. The Bottom Billion explains that statistical evidence will be used to ‘smash’ stereotyped images of ‘noble rebels, starving children, heartless businesses and crooked politicians’. In the process, Collier hopes the reader will get ‘a flavour of how modern research is done, and the thrill that comes from cracking intractable questions’.

The dramatic expansion of econometric and quantitative-modelling techniques has been one of the most significant trends throughout the social sciences since the 1990s. Originally elaborated within the rational-choice framework of American neo-classical economics, mathematical models of risk-analysis or game theory have now spread into the ‘political’ domains of military conflict, state forms and ethno-linguistic identities. The resulting discipline—part economics, part statistics, part quantitative political science—now plays a central role not only in scholarship, but in formulating policy options for global institutions. The dense thicket of algebraic equations with which econometric studies are hedged normally ensures them a narrowly specialized readership. In the past, Collier’s work on civil war has produced such results as Uw = {p(D).T; M; C}, where the utility of choosing rebellion (Uw) is a function of the probability of victory (p), the gains to rebels upon victory (T), the potential for government defence spending (D), the expected duration of the conflict (M) and the co-ordination costs of mobilizing for rebellion (C). By contrast, Bottom Billion and Wars, Guns and Votes are breezy reads, sprinkled with anecdotes, which keep the datasets and algebra out of sight, though fully referenced.

Among critics of neo-classical economics, econometric approaches to issues such as civil war and social breakdown tend to provoke a set of almost visceral objections. First, the expression of complex, historically produced structures and motivations through the binaries of individual rational-choice calculation—will I lose or gain by rebelling against the government?—is condemned for its extreme economic reductionism. Second, econometrics is often accused of simply corroborating what the data it deploys has already shown. This was certainly a charge levelled against Collier’s early work, a 1986 study of Tanzania’s ujamaa villages, which crunched figures from a dataset of village surveys to show that intra-village income differences were greater than inter-village ones. The conclusion had already been substantiated by a sophisticated body of empirical work, which had also pointed to the existence of pre-ujamaa rural class differentiations. Collier and his collaborators simply overwrote this research in the name of ‘rigorous’ statistical methods. A third charge is that of opaque causality: statistical risk-analysis typically shows up correlations between, say, poor economic performance and the likelihood of civil war, but in itself cannot tell whether the lagging economy is exacerbating social tensions, or whether the tensions are causing the economy to lag—delaying investment, for example.

There are good grounds for all these objections. Nevertheless, in rejoinder it might be said that any model requires some form of reduction, while the transformation of social and economic data into quantifiable, comparable series may reveal surprising patterns, which can generate new questions and insights into unforeseen outcomes or unintended consequences—correlations between, say, girls’ education and falling birth-rates, or rural unemployment and civil war. As to the problems of causality, sophisticated models have increasingly been able to introduce controls for this. This work deserves to be given serious critical examination, not just because of its overwhelming predominance in development research and policy-making, but because the problems it addresses are so stark. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, gdp per capita, health, mortality and adult literacy rates have all deteriorated significantly over the past decades; over a third of the population is classified as undernourished; and in some regions, civil wars, with their accompanying mass rapes and population displacements, appear almost endemic. It would be foolish to pretend that the solutions to these problems are obvious. Well-informed proposals for diagnoses and cures should be considered on their merits.

The fundamental premise of The Bottom Billion is that the shape of world capitalist development has undergone a radical change since the 1980s. For forty years, Collier argues, the ‘development challenge’ had consisted of ‘a rich world of one billion people facing a poor world of five billion people’. This is no longer the case: ‘Most of the five billion, about 80 per cent, live in countries that are indeed developing, often at amazing speed. The real challenge of development is that there is a group of countries at the bottom that are falling behind, and often falling apart.’ As a result, ‘we must learn to turn the familiar numbers upside down: a total of five billion who are already prosperous, or at least on track to be so, and one billion who are stuck at the bottom.’ Why is this unfortunate sixth of humanity not benefiting from the economic conditions that are delivering prosperity elsewhere? According to Collier, the 58 states in which the ‘bottom billion’ live have become ‘stuck’ in what Jeffrey Sachs has termed ‘development traps’, which hinder economic growth. Collier proceeds to define four such traps—endemic conflict, natural-resource dependence, lack of coastal access, ‘bad governance’—and draws on the results of his team’s statistical analyses to calculate how the inter-relations of these and further factors (population size, education levels, ethnic heterogeneity, political systems, military budgets, gdp growth rates) might mitigate or exacerbate a country’s prospects.

Collier sets out to ‘explain the conflict trap’—the propensity of poor countries to have civil wars or military coups—‘statistically’, drawing on the University of Michigan’s ‘Correlates of War’ database. His team found three variables associated with civil war: gdp per capita of less than $2,700, a slow growth rate and dependence on primary commodities, such as oil or diamonds. By contrast, neither ethnic oppression nor inequality correlate statistically with civil war, although ‘ethnic dominance’ may do so. Thus, for the growth rate, Collier estimates that the ‘typical’ risk of civil war, 14 per cent, falls to 11 per cent if the economy grows by 3 per cent. By contrast, he analyses the ‘natural resource trap’ in terms of political factors. Collier’s team finds that a newly established democracy with natural resources will grow more slowly, since politicians will use resource windfalls to buy votes rather than for investment. However, if there are sufficient checks and balances to penalize patronage and corruption, the growth rate is higher. Botswana is, apparently, the shining example of this combination of factors.