Paul Collier author photo
Image via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Paul Collier

Born: April 23, 1949 – Sheffield, England, United Kingdom

Paul Collier is a British economist and public policy scholar known for work on poverty, African development, migration, and fragile states. A professor at the University of Oxford, he wrote The Bottom Billion and Exodus, influential books that helped shape debate on development policy, conflict, and globalization.

Quotes

quote
We need not just a “Year of the Bottom Billion,” but several decades
-TED Blog: Consider the Bottom Billion for More Than One Year
quote
I am not hostile to aid. I think we should increase it, though given the looming recession in Europe and North America, I doubt we will. But other policies on governance, agriculture, security and trade could be used to potent effect
-TED Blog: Consider the Bottom Billion for More Than One Year
quote
Too often in Africa’s history, money that should have financed productive investment has been looted or squandered
-The Last Resource Frontier
quote
If we look at the history of resource extraction in Africa and elsewhere, it is not a happy history. In fact, it is a history of plunder
-IMF Survey: Resource-rich Countries Can Learn from History, Says Collier
quote
Governments need to find a balance between present and future needs
-IMF Survey: Resource-rich Countries Can Learn from History, Says Collier
quote
The overarching difference is that these countries are desperately capital scarce
-Still the Bottom Billion
quote
The right macro answers, taking the micro and institutional as given—which is what the IMF has been doing—are the wrong macro answers for development
-Still the Bottom Billion
quote
It’s absolutely critical that we develop a broad understanding of the important issues, to create what I like to call a critical mass of informed citizens
-What links the top 0.1 percent and the bottom billion? Rent
quote
The overall message of Left Behind is joyful: communities long left behind can catch up
-Left Behind

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Community Voices

"Paul Collier is one of the world's most thoughtful economists"

The Economist

"Paul Collier must be read if one is to begin to understand the most vital contemporary arguments"

Bob Geldof

"In this brilliant, passionate, angry book, Paul Collier makes a completely convincing case for hope"

Rebecca Henderson

"Paul Collier deploys passion, pragmatism and good economics in equal measure to chart an alternative to the divisions tearing apart so many western countries"

Mervyn King

"Paul Collier's new book on international migration is magisterial"

Robert D. Putnam

"Paul Collier, a distinguished economist, ventures onto the terrain of ethics to explain what's gone wrong with capitalism and how to fix it"

Michael J. Sandel

"Paul Collier has written another brilliant, must-read book for anyone interested in human progress"

Dambisa Moyo

"Paul Collier has written with great insight about the prospects of the bottom billion"

Michael Spence

"Paul Collier brings his astonishing range of global experiences and interdisciplinary knowledge to forge a guidebook for catching up"

Angus Deaton

"These times are in desperate need of Paul Collier's insights"

George Akerlof

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