Paul Collier’s Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places, reviewed

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This book “is about places that once felt prosperous but now have fallen behind. They are found all over the world, even in rich countries that have poor regions.” These are the opening words of Paul Collier’s Left Behind. Collier hails from the city of Sheffield in the UK’s county of South Yorkshire, and describes it as an example of a place “left behind” in a prosperous country.

Whole countries have been “left behind”, many in Africa, such as Somalia, the Central Africa Republic and even Malawi – and the causes are many and varied. In Malawi, it was corruption that contributed – as shown in the chapter “Small is not always beautiful.”

He writes: “Once an autocracy, in 1995 Malawians ousted their aged ruler, who had been in power for 28 years. It became a multiparty democracy: as one of the poorest new democracies in the world, it began to attract large aid inflows.”