Episode 6: From Poverty to Prosperity with Oxford Professor Sir Paul Collier
I'm joined by one of the world's foremost development economists and former Res. Director of the World Bank. A man whose life work specifically focuses on how to turn around fragile nations.
Poverty Alleviation, Economic Development: a lot of guff terms being thrown around by institutions, summit-attendees, diplomats and development experts. What do these terms actually mean? What are we trying to achieve? Do aid institutions even work? Who are the bottom billion people living in structural poverty? Is the current trajectory we’re going towards as humans taking us forward or backward?
My guest today spent the past 25+ years researching this and wrote 4 books on the topics of poverty alleviation, governance, and sustainable growth. His work is mainstream literature taught at the best public policy programs across the world and adopted by policymakers around the world. One of his most famous works includes the book 'The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It'.
Professor Sir Paul Collier is a current Professor of Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University where he also heads the International Growth Centre. He also served as the former Director of the World Bank.
In this episode we talk about:
-definitions, types, and causes of poverty.
-properties of fragile states and the 'bottom billion' people in the world
-how states can manufacture turnarounds including learnings from examples of growing middle-income countries such as Bangladesh, India, Singapore etc.
-where Western institutions working in the development sector get it wrong and how to ameliorate those errors.
-how to achieve good leadership and governance at a state-level.
You can listen to it by clicking on your favorite podcast platform of choice as below:
Here are the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players, you should be able to click the timestamp for the episode.
(00:00) - Intro
(06:23) - Humble roots and what made Sir Paul interested in the topics of development economics and governance?
(08:25) - What is poverty? Does poverty always have to relate with a financial benchmark? What are the types and causes of poverty?
(10:37) - Who are the "Bottom Billion"?
(12:11) - what are the structural traps to poverty that Bottom Billion countries have?
(22:13) - How do the Western institutions allocate capital for the development sector?
(26:43) - What role do the World Bank and other financial institutions play to bolster infrastructure building?
(30:26) - How can states manufacture turnarounds?
(38:16) - How do countries like Bangladesh and other developing states continue to grow (autopilot development) despite high number of corruption and poverty?
(42:13) - Are we on the right trajectory in terms of alleviating poverty? What roles do the government and state leaders have to establish strong societies?
(46:16) - Outro
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