BOOK REVIEW The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About Itby Paul Collier; Oxford University Press; €22 ALTHOUGH POVERTY is something most countries are managing to escape, a large group of smallish states are simply failing to develop and this is the world's biggest economic problem, according to former World Bank economist Paul Collier.

In his latest book, he has identified 58 stagnating countries where nearly one billion people live in extreme poverty, and he argues that as the world becomes more socially integrated this ghetto of destitution will be unacceptable and explosive.

Collier explains that the development challenge has changed; it is no longer that of the five billion people of the developing world as many states, such as India and Malaysia, have jumped into middle-income status or are steadily growing.

Today's agenda, rather, is to change the plight of those who live in stagnating countries in sub-Saharan Africa and other places such as Haiti, Burma and central Asia.

The countries where development has failed so far face difficult problems that defy traditional approaches to tackling poverty, and Collier proposes and explains four traps that plague these malfunctioning economies.

These are the "conflict trap", the "natural resources trap", the trap of being "landlocked with bad neighbours" and the trap of "bad governance".

Collier says what is needed is a broader set of instruments and a narrower focus on these countries to help them catch up with the likes of Asia and India.

He proposes aid can only work combined with three other remedies: ending conflict, with security guarantees to endangered countries; laws and charters to encourage good governance; and giving the poorest countries unrestricted access to the markets of the developed world.

Instead of just doubling aid, he suggests a more sophisticated agenda with policies that would help the people within these societies that are struggling to achieve change and that would lessen the many odds against them.

For example, he says the G8 could adopt a common set of rules for African exports that would give better access to developed markets worldwide and help generate jobs.

He says that corrupt politicians of resource-rich states have their money stacked away in the banks of the developed world and the reporting of any potentially corrupt deposits need to become a requirement of banking, with the freezing and repatriation of those deposits made easier.

He proposes military intervention in some cases and says there are several post-conflict situations that need this sort of commitment.

And if they don't get it, nearly half of these countries will revert to war within 10 years.

You will learn so much from this book, such as why if a country has a lot of natural resources it is in all likelihood going to be uncompetitive in other exports.

Why democracy does not seem to help turn around policy if checks and balances are not in place before electoral competition, and why the World Bank has more staff in middle-income countries than the societies that contain the poorest billion.

Collier says what is required is a change of attitude - and not just in the development agencies.

He says the left will find approaches it has discounted - such as military interventions, trade and encouraging growth - are critical means to the outcome it has been looking for.

They need to change the way of viewing everything through the spectrum of rich countries oppressing poor countries.

The right will find that unlike the challenge of global poverty reduction, the problem of the bottom billion will not be fixed automatically by global growth, and that the notion of aid being part of the problem has to be re-evaluated.

Collier warns that if nothing is done, these states will gradually diverge from the rest of the world economy over the next couple of decades and a billion people stuck in desperate conditions alongside unprecedented prosperity will mean a security nightmare.

Collier is the current director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University, and he pulls his recent research and that of his colleagues together to give an interesting reassessment of why vast populations remain trapped in poverty and what the potential solutions are.

He keeps well clear of footnotes but underpinning the book is a dense forest of economic research and statistical analysis. What readers get is a clean, easy-to-read style.

Collier says these countries need to be rescued from within and there are brave people trying to introduce change.

There are powerful internal forces stacked against them, but also ways to make it easier for the brave reformers. The bottom line is that we cannot afford not to help them out.