Sir Paul Collier, CBE, FBA (born 23 April 1949) is a British development economist who serves as the Professor of Economics and Public Policy in the Blavatnik School of Government and the director of the International Growth Centre.^[2]

He currently is a Professeur invité at Sciences Po and a Professorial Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford.^[3] 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.^[4]

Collier was born on 23 April 1949.^[1] 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.^[5][6]

Collier was brought up in Sheffield where he attended King Edward VII School. He studied Philosophy, politics, and economics at the University of Oxford.^[7]

In 2010 and 2011, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine on its list of top global thinkers.^[8][9]

He was a founder of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford 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.

Collier currently serves on the advisory board of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP).

Collier is a specialist in the political, economic and developmental predicaments of low-income countries.^[10] 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.^[11]

Collier's 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, which like Collier's book, discuss the pros and cons of development aid to developing countries.^[10]

His 2010 book The Plundered Planet^{[12][13][14][15][16]} is encapsulated in his formulas:

Nature – Technology + Regulation = Starvation

Nature + Technology – Regulation = Plunder

Nature + Technology + Regulation (Good governance) = Prosperity

The book describes itself as an attempt at a middle way between the extremism of "Ostriches" (denialism, particularly climate change denial) and "Environmental Romanticism" (for example, anti-genetically modified organisms movements in Europe). The book is about sustainable management in relation with the geo-politics of global warming, with an attempt to avoid a global tragedy of the commons, with the prime example of overfishing. In it he builds upon a legacy of the economic psychology of greed and fear, from early Utilitarianism (Jeremy Bentham) to more recently the Stern Review.

In 2020 he published Greed is Dead: Politics After Individualism, coauthored with John Kay.

Collier was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2008 Birthday Honours^[17] and knighted in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to promoting research and policy change in Africa.^[18]

In November 2014, Collier was awarded the President's Medal by the British Academy, for "his pioneering contribution in bringing ideas from research in to policy within the field of African economics."^[19] In July 2017, Collier was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.^[20]

• Environmental politics