ABSTRACT
Poverty can be either absolute or relative. At the same time there is relative poverty on a large-scale in the developed world, with millions of families struggling to meet the basic costs of housing, food, transport, heating and health care. The poverty in both the developed and developing worlds, this chapter looks at the cause of poverty in the most extreme cases, in African countries, and at some of the possible solutions. Clearly the world as a whole has a long way to go before the dream of post-scarcity can begin to apply to whole regions. Paul Collier in his scholarly analysis of the causes and possible cures of poverty focuses attention on what he calls the failed' countries that are concentrated in Africa and central Asia with a scattering elsewhere. Collier lists a number of factors which, taken together, lead to persistent extreme poverty. They are the Conflict Trap, Natural Resource Trap, Landlocked Trap and Trap of Poor Governance.
