Paul Collier

Paul Collier is a British development economist who is the Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and the Director of the International Growth Centre. He currently is a Professeur invité at Sciences Po and a Professorial Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford. He has served as a senior advisor to the Blair Commission for Africa and was the Director of the Development Research Group at the World Bank between 1998 and 2003.

Collier was born on 23 April 1949. Collier's great-grandfather, Karl Hellenschmidt, was a German immigrant to the UK. During World War I, Collier's grandfather, Karl Hellenschmidt Jr, changed his surname from Hellenschmidt to Collier. He was brought up in Sheffield, where he attended King Edward VII School and studied PPE at the University of Oxford.

He was a founder of the Centre for the Study of African Economies and remained its Director from 1989 until 2014. From 1998 until 2003, he was the Director of the Development Research Group of the World Bank. In 2010 and 2011, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine on its list of top global thinkers. Collier currently serves on the advisory board of Academics Stand Against Poverty.

Collier is a specialist in low-income countries' political, economic, and developmental predicaments. His research covers the causes and consequences of civil war; the effects of aid and the problems of democracy in low-income and natural resources-rich societies; urbanization in low-income countries; private investment in African infrastructure, and changing organizational cultures.

In 1988, he was awarded the Edgar Graham Book Prize for the co-written Labour and poverty in rural Tanzania: Ujamaa and rural development in the United Republic of Tanzania. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It has been compared to Jeffrey Sachs's The End of Poverty and William Easterly's The White Man's Burden, two influential books, like Collier's book, which discusses the pros and cons of development aid to developing countries.

Collier was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2008 Birthday Honours and knighted in the 2014 New Year Honours for services promoting research and policy change in Africa. In November 2014, Collier was awarded the President's Medal by the British Academy for "his pioneering contribution in bringing ideas from research into policy within the field of African economics." In July 2017, Collier was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national humanities and social sciences academy.