This is the bottom billion you hear Oxford university world poverty scholar Paul Collier and others talking about.

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Discussion along these lines can be found in a book published last year, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.

FORBES: Magazine Article

The history of finance is also a history of inclusion and economic empowerment, and many of its success stories started as social innovations: from cooperative banks for farmers to community banks for the urban poor, all the way to microcredit for the bottom billion today.

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The carmaker says that one yen of appreciation for the Japanese currency translates into a 30 billion yen hit to its bottom line.

MSN: The hollowing out of Japan��s auto industry

Four billion people worldwide lie squarely at the bottom of the economic pyramid, eking out a marginal existence of about three dollars per day.

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Telekom's bottom line collapsed, and the company recorded a whopping euro3.5 billion loss last year thanks largely to the acquisition of VoiceStream.

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Bottom line: BAC is probably liable for putbacks that could total over a hundred billion.

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The private sector is more established in India (notice its better showing again on the Forbes Asia Best Under a Billion list of small- and medium-sized enterprises) but Indonesia is learning bottom-up growth without referral to a strongman and his cronies.

FORBES: India Compares Best to Indonesia