Books by Paul Collier
Center for Study of African Economies at Oxford
The Plundered Planet
Oxford University Press 2010 333.7 COLLIER - Hillsboro
I started this slow - Collier focuses on governance, while I focus on tools for the powerless. That is where the book ends up. He is an economist, and thinks about incentives.
Collier's focus is on stewardship of resources, natural and economic, for the benefit of the poor and the future. He castigates corporate, government, and "romantic" mismanagement.
Quadrants of 194 countries: wealthy, emerging, Russia/China, and the bottom billion, each about 25% of the world's land.
Resource plunder: extracted by foreign corporations, bribes to government ministers, no lasting value for people. Best management would invest the resources in local development, and in wealthy country markets until local conditions permit development.
Resource extraction: Countries don't know what they have. Countries can change the rules and abrogate contracts. Commodity pricing is extremely volatile. This makes pricing deals extremely difficult, and citizens get less because of the cupidity of their rulers. Many resource-extracting countries end up worse-off economically, creating debt in boom times when they should invest almost all of it.
Norway, Botswana, Malaysia: resources turned into long term growth and security. Transition to prosperity can take a decade, patience is rewarded.
Nigeria: vast oil money, misinvested. The Concrete Armada - ships full of concrete for construction, nowhere to unload or use it, so Lagos pays huge demurrage fees for the ships to wait. Nigerian oil wealth redistributed according to population, not usefulness - and provinces inflate population statistics to get more. Lagos is the choke point - more people moving there, insufficient resources, an underequipped gateway to the world.
p129: Nuhu Ribadu, Nigerian policeman appointed by President Obasanjo to prosecute corruption. Chased out after Obasanjo left office.
- Steward Brand approvingly mentioned on p015 and p182.
p133: absorption problem of managing incresed investment. Manage three things 1) public investment (with tendered bidding) 2) complementary private investment 3) price of purchased capital goods.
veto points checkpoints in the process, stopping abuses.
Cost-benefit analysis can fail to capture immeasurable benefits. Economists unavailable to do the analysis.
p139: doubling city population increases percapita productivity 6%.
Romantics: Anti-tecnnology in Britain (aristos), Anti GMO in Europe, "Food"-ihol in US (but anti-Brazilian sugar biofuel, the efficient kind). Prince Charles: romantic aristocrat (KL: seemingly no education in science or logical thinking). "peasants in aspic"
p146: To facilitate fast response to extraction commodity price crashes, policy should facilitate opening and closing businesses.
p147: capital goods are inelastic - boom time investment drives up construction and equipment cost. contested land titles chokes off construction.
p148: small markets inelastic, unresponsive
p149: slumps are the best time for construction and infrastructure investment
p155: medieval Britain planted yew trees for long bows, but "thanks to technology we can now shoot people more efficiently".
p156: What will the future think of us? when we deplete assets, are we compensating the future with other (technical? structural?) assets?
p159: the future will judge us not for our actions, but for their ideological convenience.
p160: public assets are plundered - overfishing because nobody owns them.
p163: $80B fish catch, $30B subsidies. OECD subsidizes fleets to plunder bottom-billion oceans (Sierra Leone) Somalia fisheries ransacked by foreign fleets, fishermen resorted to piracy.
p165: un-owned fish will be plundered to extinction
p168: Collier proposes assigning nonterritorial ocean fish to UN which sells rights, collected where landed or sold wholesale, and priced to reflect future demand increase.
p177: Assignment of carbon rights creates rent-seeking, lobbying machines, and scamming.
p185: Carbon tax that reflects $40/ton damage, applied globally, leads to global coordination
p187: There is no reason for a government to use a carbon tax to raise its total revenue take sez Collier; nonsense say I. They will raise taxes as much as they can.
p195: Copenhagen summit based on theology of guilt, attribution of blame. Had the poor countries industrialized simultaneously with us, CO₂ levels would be huge. We help them achieve prosperity because we can and we should, not because we've generated more CO₂ since 1940. "Blame" and "rights" will simply shift high pollution industries to them, as it has shifted those industries from California to China.
p210: Food is inelastic, increased demand in Asia raises prices for the poor. CO₂ increases climatic volatility (I thought it moved agricultural zones towards the poles?) so prices will be more valuable.
p211: Urban poor spend half their income on food. Children starve, stunted development, long term cost. food-miles thinking starves and impoverishes. Commercial agriculture 10%-20% more efficient.
Romanticism 1: small local farms Romanticism 2: banning genetic modification Romanticism 3: local biofuel (instead of Brazillian sugar ethanol)
The Bottom Billion
Oxford University Press 2007 338.9009 COLLIER - Hillsboro
The war on savings - my neologism
NGOs driven by ideology, hate growth and investment. The headless heart.
p11: "Yet the central problem of the bottom billion is that they have not grown."
G8 2005 meeting, Gleneagles, 2007 meeting, Germany
Poverty Traps
Conflict: civil wars and coups
- p73: civil wars cost $64 billion to a region
Natural resources: Dutch disease, resource income displaces local economic development Landlocked with bad Neighbors: no access to global markets. Air-locked or E-locked - air cargo and internet.
- Remittances help, but second-generation emigrants send less. p61: Phillipines educates to maximize emigrant success.
Bad governance: resource grabbing and corrupt contracting by the powerful and brutal
- p66: Chad 2004, only 1% of funding reached rural health clinics
p79: escape rate 2% per year
p81: recent change: 80% of developing countries' exports are manufactures
p82: Krugman Venables: "economics of agglomeration", first factory improves infrastructure for second factory, feedback growth
p83: Madagascar 1990s, export processing zone grew to 300K (of 15M) jobs, strangled by election-losing Admiral Didier Ratsiraka
p86: China makes resource deals to support dictators like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe.
p89: Institutional Investor 1(bad)-100(good) country risk scale: Uganda from 5 in 1990? (worst in Africa) to 23 in 1997
p91: capital flight often hidden in fake export pricing. in 1990 author estimated 38% of private wealth held abroad. Bad local investment conditions frighten domestic investors.
p93: Migration is "human capital flight" - education brings remittances but not local development
Aid: usually reactively timed, much after cessation of conflict but not for long term growth.
- p103: 40% of Africa's military spending is financed by aid.
p104: poverty-efficient aid should go to bottom billion - usually a crapshoot, but some gambles pay off 30x (is this related to the 2% escape rate?) p109: policy conditionality pay for promises (ex ante). Kenya reneged on reform 5 times, but still got aid. World Bank changed to "ex post", pay for attained level of policies p110: shift power to citizens. p110: GW Bush Millennium Challenge was ex ante, bypass USAID which was captured by congressional commercial lobbies. p111: aid as skills, expat technical assistance leading to local expertise p117: venture aid fund. p118: independent service authorities, wholesale purchase of basic services
- my question: can new bureaucracy creation rate exceed clever crook corruption rate?
Military intervention: Best: US in Kuwait, British Operation Palliser in Sierra Leone. Worst: US in Iraq, Somalia, Angola. French in Côte d'Ivoire.
- p133: Luisa Diogo Mozambique radically cut military spending, peace endured.
Laws and Charters Banks take loot from corruption, but little oversight, compared to finances for terrorism.
- p141: Executive Industries Transparency Initiative (Britain 2002), successor to Publish What You Pay campaign.
p144: DeBeers "if the image of conflict diamonds became entrenched in the minds of consumers, diamonds could go the way of furs". p144: "because of the trace elements found in oil, its origin is detectable" p145: When Shell proposed to badly discard Brent Spar North Sea oil well, German sales plunged 30%. p146: developing country democracy score: 2 in 1980s, 4.5 "now" (2006?). p148: control of dominant media - was newspapers, now television (radio in poorer countries). p150: Uganda, "mid-1990s": Emmanuel Tumusiimi-Mutebile released money with publicity - local media, posters in each school setting out what it should be getting. Instead of 20% getting though, 90% did. Local public scrutiny multiplies aid. p150: Nigeria, 2003: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala published month-by-month, state-by-state budged releases in newspapers.
Trade Policy p156: guilt "is contrived, and diverts attention from a practical agenda". "poverty is simply the default option when economies malfunction".
- p156: British charity Christian Aid 2004: advocacy campaign against free trade and capitalism. Based on "study" by young marxist at School of Oriental and African Studies, "reviewed" by fake American group. p159 British politicians too scared of CA to dare to contradict it. NGOs have power without responsibility. p164: rich regional integration (import/export restrictions) benefits poorest (closest to world average), poor regional integration benefits richest, subjecting the poor region's poorest to higher prices.
p167: export diversification: difficult vs. established asia. my question: what if we diversify the range of products? Asia cannot be good at everything all at once. Help the bottom billion discover new things to be good at. p192: "The struggle ... is not a contest between an evil rich world and a noble poor world. It is within the societies of the bottom billion, and to date we have largely been bystanders." "we should narrow the target and broaden the investments"
Exodus
Oxford University Press JC6033.C65 2013 PSUlib
An eye-opening book, politically incorrect, about migration from poor to rich countries.
Until the bottom billion catches up with the developed world, migration is how ambitious people escape poverty and war. "Too many" and they form into diasporas in the host countries, unassimilated and conflicting with the indigenous populations. Collier's main prescription is to set limits on migration to maximize the benefits for smaller numbers of migrants.
The main problem is that assimilation slows when a diaspora is big enough and concentrated enough to isolate migrants from the indigenes in mutually suspicious camps. The left favors "cultural diversity" over assimilation (I suppose I should eat lutefisk and wear a cowboy hat), which creates tension, and politically exploitable groups with grievances.
Collier's grandfather Karl Hellenschmidt immigrated from Ernsbach Germany to Bradford England around 1900, married an English wife, and had 6 children by the beginning of World War One. He is interned as an enemy alien, his wife suicides, and his twelve year old son leaves school to run the family shop. Twenty years later, Karl Hellenschmidt Jr. moves and changes his name to Charles Collier. My grandfather immigrated from Sweden in 1911, and changed his last name from "Löfström" "Lofstrom" when he settled in Oregon. He probably encountered some anti-European hostility during World War One, but America was (and is) better at assimilating than Britain.