Economist and Environmentalist, Sir Paul Collier, is a world-leading expert on solutions to poverty, and a Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Oxford University. He is also one of the world’s leading experts on developing markets and financial opportunities within the poorest countries.

He was recently an Advisor to the Strategy and Policy Department of the IMF and Advisor to the Africa Region of the World Bank, where he previously served as Director of the Development Research Group.

Sir Paul is a particularly important speaker for businesses and organizations concerned with emerging markets, as he effectively demonstrates the value, and the virtue, in combining compassion with wise investment strategies.

He writes a monthly column for the Independent, and his commentary also appears regularly in the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. His bestselling book, The Bottom Billion, which has been compared to Jeffrey Sachs’s The End of Poverty and William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden in its scope and impact, identifies the four traps that keep such countries mired in poverty, and outlines ways to help them escape. He is also the author of Wars, Guns and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places and The Plundered Planet: How to reconcile prosperity with nature.

Plenty of people have wrung their hands over the fate of the world's poorest, but few have thought more deeply and systematically than Paul Collier about how they got that way. In the 2007 book that first brought his ideas to wide attention, The Bottom Billion, the Oxford University professor offered a powerful antidote to the fatalism that often permeates discussions of global poverty: It's all about attacking bad governance.

He has twice been presented as a TED Speaker, a testimony to his unique importance in the global economy and his skill as a compelling orator.