DESTIN and STICERD public lecture
Date: Thursday 18 October 2007
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: Old Theatre, Old Building
Speaker: Professor Paul Collier
Chair: Professor Stuart Corbridge
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which track poverty among 5 billion people, miss the key future challenge for development policy. This is that around 50 countries, now at the bottom of the world economy, are economically stagnant and so are diverging from the rest of mankind at an accelerating rate. The lecture analyzes why these countries, with around a billion people, are diverging - why globalization generates both convergence for most of the developing world and divergence at the bottom. Based on this diagnosis of the problems, it shows why the current approach of the G8 is liable to fail, and how a more serious and broadly based set of policies could be radically more effective.
Paul Collier is professor of economics at Oxford University. His new book, The Bottom Billion: why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it, is described by the New York Times as 'the best book on international affairs this year', and by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times as 'wonderful'. In 2006 he gave the Annual Public Lecture of the Royal Economic Society.
Podcast
A podcast of this event is available to download from the LSE public lectures and events podcasts channel.