Paul Collier

Este archivo solo abarca los artículos del autor incorporados a este sitio a partir del 1 de diciembre de 2006. Para fechas anteriores realice una búsqueda entrecomillando su nombre.

Elizabeth Sizar, a new arrival from South Sudan and mother of two, poses for a photo with her youngest son in front of their home in the Kalobeyei settlement. (Samuel Otieno/UNHCR)

Every June 20, on World Refugee Day, the headlines invariably focus on numbers. But numbers are not the issue; only about 0.3 percent of the world’s population are refugees. The real challenge comes from unequal geographical concentration.

Most refugees will never come to the United States or Europe. Around 85 percent end up in low and middle-income countries like Lebanon, Pakistan and Uganda, and just 10 such countries host 60 percent of the world’s refugees. This means refugee protection is primarily a developing world issue, and there is a lack of global responsibility-sharing.

Refugees stay in these safe haven countries for decades.…  Seguir leyendo »

Nigeria ha estado recibiendo mucha mala prensa últimamente, en gran medida debido al rapto por el grupo militante islamista Boko Haram de más de doscientas estudiantes en abril, como parte de una brutal campaña de secuestros, atentados y asesinatos. Pero, si bien estas cuestiones ciertamente ameritan la preocupación internacional, no se debe permitir que oscurezcan los recientes logros de Nigeria, ni que alienten al resto del mundo a darle la espalda al país.

Lo que se deja de lado en la mayoría de las discusiones actuales sobre Nigeria es el sólido historial económico que ha establecido durante la última década. De hecho, un reciente estudio sobre el país, al cual el McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) dedicó un año, mostró que Nigeria tiene potencial para convertirse en una de las principales economías del mundo en los próximos 15 años.…  Seguir leyendo »

Although the Group of Eight has often been used for gestures, it affords a rare opportunity for common action by the governments of major countries. Manifestly, there have been serious deficiencies in global economic governance. By addressing them the G-8 can help not only ourselves, but the people struggling in the world’s poorest countries. This has been Britain’s agenda as host of this year’s G-8.

At the top of the agenda has been taxation. Tax cooperation has not kept pace with the internationalization of business and the innovations of corporate lawyers and accountants. Treaties designed to avoid double taxation now deliver double non-taxation.…  Seguir leyendo »

En el próximo decenio, la extracción de petróleo, gas y minerales no transformados constituirá la oportunidad económica más importante, con mucha diferencia, de la historia de África. Este continente es la última frontera para el descubrimiento de recursos, por haber estado durante mucho tiempo relativamente desatendido por las compañías mineras y otras dedicadas a la extracción de recursos, en vista de las difíciles condiciones políticas existentes en él, pero el aumento de los precios de los productos básicos está venciendo su renuencia y las prospecciones están brindando una infinidad de nuevos descubrimientos.

En vista de que la extracción de recursos por kilómetro cuadrado en África representa el 20 por ciento de la media de la OCDE, el volumen total de extracción podría fácilmente multiplicarse por cinco.…  Seguir leyendo »

The news that Afghanistan has $1 trillion in unmined mineral deposits has been met with some pessimism. Now, it is said, the country will be transformed from its present condition into the next Congo, whose new wealth from gold, copper and other minerals has brought mainly corruption and violence.

Indeed, security in Afghanistan could easily deteriorate as a result of the discoveries, as it has not only in Congo but also in Nigeria (rich in oil) and Sierra Leone (diamonds). Afghanistan’s huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and lithium and other metals could end up financing more tribal and ideological warfare.…  Seguir leyendo »

In an astonishing outpouring of generosity, nearly half of American households have donated money to help Haiti recover from the recent earthquake. The United States government and other governments around the world, for their part, have sent thousands of relief workers and have pledged $1 billion so far. But Haitians need something more fundamental than relief from the present situation; they need jobs that they can count on for years ahead. For this, the private business sector is essential. Luckily, business leaders are meeting now in Davos, Switzerland, and Haiti is prominent on their agenda.

Haiti is by far the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and yet it need not be so, because unexploited economic opportunities abound there.…  Seguir leyendo »

Haiti is on all the lists of "failing states". Yet the persistence of its troubles demonstrates not so much their intractability as the past incompetence of the international community in helping to tackle them. Haiti should not be a failing state: its fundamentals such as neighbourhood are remarkably favourable. Its problems are fixable if the international community moves beyond gestures to a co-ordinated use of a range of policies: security, trade, governance and aid.

Like most failing states, Haiti is structurally insecure and periodically torn apart by political violence. It has one of the fastest rates of population growth in the world and a chronic shortage of jobs.…  Seguir leyendo »

This time last year Kenya was in flames, torn apart by ethnic violence triggered by a flawed election. About a thousand people were killed, and several hundred thousand fled their homes in response to ethnic cleansing. Even prior to the violence, politics was already ethnically polarised. The election pitted a Kikuyu against a Luo - President Mwai Kibaki against Raila Odinga - and about 98% of Luo people voted for Odinga. There was little faith in the elections: in the run-up a local joke was that there would be a Luo president of America before there was a Luo president of Kenya.…  Seguir leyendo »

African regimes are excessively long-lasting, but two have just ended. In Ghana change happened through an election won by the opposition; in Guinea through a coup. The Ghana result has rightly been welcomed by the international community, mainly because in Africa it is so rare for oppositions to win. They succeed only when ruling parties lack the power to cheat.

The ruling party in Ghana was relatively powerless because the incumbent president had hit his term limit and so was not standing; power relations in Africa are so personalised that this weakened the party's grip. Another problem was that, atypically, the government did not have big revenues from natural resources.…  Seguir leyendo »

Much of my work has been on conflict in Africa, so the latest catastrophe in the Democratic Republic of Congo has unsurprisingly generated questions of the form "What now?" My buck-dodging answer is: "Don't start from here." We are where we are because of the persistent failure of the international community to face reality. Part of that reality is that the UN is ill-suited to a reactive mode of operations: reaction requires decisions and logistics that are usually stymied by a lack of consensus and resources. So what is the alternative to the reactive mode? It is to pre-empt these situations by changing the approach that has been adopted in post-conflict societies.…  Seguir leyendo »

Thanks to the copper boom, Zambia’s economy at last is growing. Last year, per capita gross domestic product rose by around 4 percent. The capital is busy with new construction, and traffic between here and the copper belt is so heavy, travel time has doubled to eight hours.

Still, Zambia is diverging from the rest of mankind. Its tax system has until last month been so lenient that most of the new copper profits have gone to the foreign companies that now own the mines. And the political and economic collapse of neighboring Zimbabwe has meant a loss of trade.

Zambians remain in the “bottom billion” of the earth’s poorest people — those whom Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, declared would be the focus of development efforts for 2008.…  Seguir leyendo »

The world price of staple foods has rocketed, almost doubling in the past 18 months. For consumers in the rich world this massive increase in the price of wheat or rice is an inconvenience; for consumers in the poorest countries it is a catastrophe.

Food accounts for around half of the entire budget of most Africans. Of course some poor households sell food, but many are net buyers. Indeed, decades of agricultural stagnation and growing populations have turned many African countries into food importers. The households that are poor and net purchasers of food are concentrated in the urban slums. These slums are already political powder kegs: rising food prices have triggered riots from Ivory Coast to Indonesia, from Burkina Faso to Bangladesh.…  Seguir leyendo »