Sir Paul Collier, CBE, FBA, is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford. He is also Professeur invité at Sciences Po and a co-director of the International Growth Centre, a joint initiative of LSE and Oxford. From 1998 to 2003 he served as Director of the Development Research Group at the World Bank, and he was the founding Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford, which he led from 1989 until 2014.
Collier studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford, where he also earned his D.Phil. He has previously held a professorship at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and served as a senior advisor to the Blair Commission for Africa. In 2014 he was awarded a knighthood for services to promoting research and policy change in Africa, and in 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.
His research covers the causes and consequences of civil war, the political economy of fragile states, the management of natural resources, urbanisation in low-income countries, and most recently the economics of "left behind" regions in advanced economies. He is the author of several internationally acclaimed books, including The Bottom Billion (2007), which won the Lionel Gelber, Arthur Ross and Corine prizes; Wars, Guns and Votes (2009); The Plundered Planet (2010); Exodus: How Migration is Changing Our World (2013); Refuge: Rethinking Refugee Policy in a Changing World (with Alexander Betts, 2017); The Future of Capitalism (2018); Greed is Dead (with John Kay, 2020); and Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places (2024), a Silver winner in the 2025 Axiom Business Book Awards.
Collier has also been recognised with the Adam Smith Prize from Glasgow's Philosophical Society (2023), the A.SK Social Science Prize (2013), the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize (2009), and was named by Foreign Policy magazine among its top global thinkers. He writes regularly for the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.
Jiří Zatloukal, financial journalist at Seznam Zprávy and contributor of PFI Talks, talked with Paul Collier.