Hernando de Soto

De Soto is currently President of Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD), a think tank devoted to the promotion of property rights in developing countries. De Soto works on the design and implementation of capital formation programs in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and former Soviet Nations. Some 30 heads of state have invited him to carry out these ILD programs in their countries

De Soto discovered that Peru’s poor were far from being the drain on the country’s resources that the government perceived them to be – in fact, they were contributing significantly to the economy through operating thousands of small businesses throughout the country. And yet, they were still poor and their contributions were not being counted or recognized. De Soto concluded that Peru’s poor couldn’t capitalize on their entrepreneurial activities because they lacked formal property rights to their homes and businesses and therefore could not leverage them to produce real growth. Living in homes and owning businesses that were theirs only by de facto possession and jury-rigged local agreements, not by de jure deed, meant that their homes and businesses couldn't be mortgaged, because they lacked a proper title to guarantee them as collateral.
Convinced that secure property rights were the “hidden architecture” of a modern economy, De Soto established the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, an unusual think-tank that specializes in identifying the bottlenecks in legal and governmental systems as well as those places where enabling law is clearly missing to make economies run most efficiently. Since then, De Soto has brought an unprecedented degree of attention and funding to the vital issue of squatters and informal economies. He has traveled the world to market his idea that legal reform and the simplification of property and business registration processes are a critical part of poverty alleviation efforts. His highly-trained teams of ILD researchers and practioners have implemented hundreds of legal reforms and multiple titling programs around the world.

While many scholars have pointed to and explained the importance of property rights to rising living standards, De Soto’s idea is to transform poverty into wealth by: (1) focusing on the difficult task of measuring the informal economy and asking the hard question of what it takes to get the state to recognize the property rights that function within the communities of the poor; (2) providing solutions and helping to put in place the laws and institutions necessary to transform the mere physical "extralegal" control of assets into capital, a key to sustained economic development; and (3) emphasizing the enormous entrepreneurial energies of the poor. This emphasis has led to a significant mindshift among politicians and development experts who now increasingly recognize that in many countries it is the entrepreneurial resourcefulness of some of the most marginalized who ensure that millions of people are fed and clothed.

De Soto’s decades of pioneering work on property rights for the poor have led to global acclaim and recognition and made him a thought leader on poverty and economic development.