Paul Collier

This article is about the economist. For the snooker referee, see Paul Collier (snooker referee). For the disability advocate, see Paul Collier (activist).

Sir Paul Collier CBE
Collier at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in 2013
Born	(1949-04-25) 25 April 1949
Nationality	British
Institution	International Growth Centre, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford
Field	Development economics
Alma mater	University of Oxford

Sir Paul Collier, CBE (born 23 April 1949) is professor of economics and public policy in the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford.

He is also a director of the International Growth Centre, the director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies, and a fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford.

From 1998 until 2003 he was the director of the Development Research Group of the World Bank. In 2010 and 2011, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers. Collier currently serves on the advisory board of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP).

Career

Collier is a specialist in the political, economic and developmental predicaments of poor countries. He was brought up in Sheffield where he attended King Edward VII School. He holds a Distinction Award from the University of Oxford, and in 1988 he was awarded the Edgar Graham Book Prize for the co-written Labour and poverty in rural Tanzania: Ujamaa and rural development in the United Republic of Tanzania.

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (ISBN 0-19-531145-0), has been compared to Jeffrey Sachs's The End of Poverty and William Easterly's The White Man's Burden, two influential books, which like Collier's book, discuss the pros and cons of development aid to developing countries.

His 2010 book The Plundered Planet is encapsulated in his formulas:

Nature – Technology + Regulation = Starvation

Nature + Technology – Regulation = Plunder

Nature + Technology + Regulation (Good governance) = Prosperity

The book describes itself as an attempt at a middle way between the extremism of "Ostriches" (Denialism, particularly climate change denial) and "Environmental Romanticism" (for example, anti-genetically modified organisms movements in Europe). The book is about sustainable management in relation with the geo-politics of global warming, with an attempt to avoid a global tragedy of the commons, with the prime example of overfishing. In it he builds upon a legacy of the economic psychology of greed and fear, from early Utilitarianism (Jeremy Bentham) to more recently the Stern Review.

He is a patron of the Media Legal Defence Initiative.

Collier was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2008 Birthday Honours and knighted in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to promoting research and policy change in Africa.

In November 2014 Collier was awarded the President's Medal by the British Academy, for “his pioneering contribution in bringing ideas from research in to policy within the field of African economics.”

Currently he is working on a book called "State of War," in which he "sets out why [he thinks] democracy has gone wrong in the bottom billion and what would be needed to put it on track."

Work

Research topics

• Governance in low-income countries, especially the political economy of democracy
• Economic growth in Africa
• Economics of civil war, aid, globalisation and poverty
• The greed vs grievance debate in international relations

Selected publications

• The Plundered Planet: Why We Must, and How We Can, Manage Nature for Global Prosperity (2010) Oxford University Press ISBN 978-0-19-539525-9.
• Labour and poverty in rural Tanzania: Ujamaa and rural development in the United Republic of Tanzania, Oxford University Press, New York 1991, ISBN 0-19-828315-6.
• The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. ISBN 0-19-531145-0.
• (with Anke Hoeffler) 'On economic causes of civil war' Oxford Economic Papers, vol 50 iss 4, (1998), pp 563–573.
• (with Anke Hoeffler) 'Greed and grievance in civil war' Oxford Economic Papers, vol 56 iss 4, (2004), pp 563–595.
• (with Lisa Chauvet and Haavard Hegre) 'The Security Challenge in Conflict-Prone Countries', Copenhagen Consensus 2008 Challenge Paper, (2008).
• Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places, Harper, (March 2009)
• Plundered nations?: successes and failures in natural resource extraction co-edited with Anthony J. Venables (2011)
• Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World, Oxford University Press (October 2013)

Video

• The Royal Economic Society's 2006 Annual Public Lecture, by Coller (Royal Economic Society)
• Interview with Fareed Zakaria on Foreign Exchange
• TED Conference, Paul Collier on "The Bottom Billion"
• TED Conference, Paul Collier's new rules for rebuilding a broken nation

Press

• Review of The Plundered Planet by the Financial Times
• Review of the Bottom Billion by the Financial Times
• Review of the Bottom Billion in The New York Times
• Review of The Bottom Billion by William Easterly in The Lancet
• Samuel Grove, "The Bottom of the Barrel: A Review of Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done about It."

See also

• Environmental politics

External links

• Paul Collier's home page at the Blavatnik School of Government
• Links to downloadable research papers on Africa, Aid, Conflict, Political Economy and other topics
• Interview with Paul Collier by J. Tyler Dickovick
• Interview with the Oxonian Review in March 2009
• Video of recent talk at Oxford University – "The Bottom Billion"
• Paul Collier at TED
  • TED Talks: Paul Collier: The "bottom billion" (TED2008)