Can the World Be Governed?: Possibilities for Effective Multilateralism

Facing the Global Problems of Development

One of the most important problems facing the world today is the failure of Africa to develop. Concern about the nature of the problem usually focuses on poverty and mortality. In this paper, however, I attempt to shift focus by arguing that enlightened self-interest should propel the member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to take action to reverse the accelerating divergence of much of Africa from the rest of the world.1 I set out this argument in four stages. In the first, I restate the problem of African development as that of divergence rather than of poverty. In the second stage, I review four distinct bases for why citizens of OECD societies should care about Africa, and I again try to shift attention from the usual ethical basis for concern. In the third stage, I briefly make the case for enlightened self-interest in terms of the problems that divergence might generate for OECD societies. In the fourth stage, I prepare the ground for a discussion of actions the international community could take by arguing that, without external assistance, Africa’s autonomous development is likely to be, at best, a slow process. Paul Collier * * * 1. For a development of the themes in this paper, see Collier (2007). Facing the Global Problems of Development In the second part of the paper, I turn to the question of what to do about Africa’s lack of development. Here, I attempt to broaden the range of actions that are normally considered, arguing that the potency of aid has been overplayed relative to other instruments, some of which have been virtually ignored. I end by discussing how to coordinate these instruments, both between each other and among countries. The Problem of Global Development and the Need for International Action The problem of global development is usually seen as one of poverty. I think this is wrong, however, or at least dangerously inadequate. The focus on poverty is a political solution to a political problem facing the international development agencies, rather than a well-founded diagnosis of development challenges. The number of people in poverty globally, in fact, has been declining for around 25 years. If poverty is the problem, this is a battle we are winning, and globalization has quite dramatically been helping. The biggest decline in the numbers of people in poverty has been in China, which has globalized most successfully. What Is the Global Development Problem? The key development problem is not poverty, but divergence. By this I mean the tendency of a group of countries, now at the bottom of the world economy , to diverge from the rest of the world. This group is predominantly African, although not all African countries are part of it. Overall it contains about one billion people. Per capita incomes in this group have been roughly stagnant for the past three decades, whereas per capita incomes in the rest of the developing world have been rising, on average, at an accelerating rate. In the 1980s and 1990s, the per capita income of the bottom billion people diverged from that of the next four billion at around 5 percent per year, and is now only one-fifth of that of the latter group—that is, before we take into account the richest billion at all. Whether absolute poverty is slightly rising or slightly declining in the countries of the bottom billion seems to me to be altogether secondary to 242 l Paul Collier this astounding rate of divergence, which, if it were to continue, would rapidly generate an unmanageable world. A sink of failure of one billion people in a world in which global information flows and advertising produce a convergence of aspirations is liable to produce implosive pressures in the societies at the bottom and a scramble for exit. Divergence is fundamentally about the dynamics of inequalities among nations. But this fact has been neglected by all the development actors because it does not really fit their political agendas. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), most of which come from the political left within developed societies, are primarily interested in the internal distribution of income and power: their first preference is to reduce poverty through internal redistribution from the rich. The problem for development agencies such as the World Bank is that NGOs are the only constituency that has much enthusiasm for aid. Yet this constituency is deeply suspicious...