Visionary economist with a practical and
groundbreaking approach to
alleviating global poverty.

Highlights

Hernando de Soto has a simple yet visionary approach to relieving poverty in the developing world. In his groundbreaking bestseller, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, he explores the reasons that some countries succeed at capitalism while others fail and proposes solutions that have earned him international awards and advisory roles with heads of state and corporate leaders alike.

For his work, Mr. de Soto was named as a finalist to receive the Nobel Prize for Finance in 2002. Time magazine has named de Soto one of the five leading Latin American innovators of the century. The Economist deemed Mr. de Soto’s organization, the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD), the second most important think tank in the world. The German magazine Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit named Mr. de Soto one of the most important development thought leaders of the last millennium.

The Mystery of Capital was chosen as one of the ten best business and finance books for 2000 in the US and the UK and has been published in 12 languages. Both The Mystery of Capital and his other book, The Other Path, have been international bestsellers and have been translated into 20 languages.

Mr. de Soto has won numerous awards, too many to list in our credentials.

An extremely successful businessman, de Soto retired from business at the age of 38 and founded the ILD, headquartered in Lima, Peru, in 1983. ILD designs and implements capital formation programs in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and former Soviet nations, and was responsible for some four hundred initiatives, laws and regulations that changed Peru's economic system.

He co-chairs, with Madeleine Albright, the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor.

How to make capitalism work

Capital is not the accumulated stock of assets but the potential it holds to deploy new production

De Soto argues that an important characteristic of successful capitalism is the functioning state protection of property rights in a formal property system where ownership and transactions are clearly recorded. Without such an integrated system of property rights, the poor in today's developing nations find it impossible to leverage their informal ownerships into the capital necessary for successful entrepreneurship. The solution is to make this informal ownership formal, for example, by giving squatters in shanty towns land titles to the land they now live on.

The key factor is that this informal ownership represents a huge source of available capital. The total value of informally owned real estate alone is more than twenty times all direct foreign investment in developing countries and more than 90 times the foreign aid. The main obstacle to using this capital is the lack of official recognition to title and government bureaucracy. This drives them into 'underground' economies. Legalizing these titles and creating the other institutions (like standardized and fixed addresses on real estate and title search records) that make using capital possible.

Credentials

• President, Institute for Liberty and Democracy
• Former Personal Representative and Principal Advisor, President of Peru
• Former governor of Peru’s Central Reserve Bank
• Former economist, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)
• Former president, Executive Committee, Intergovernmental Council of Copper Exporting Countries (CIPEC)
• Former CEO, Universal Engineering Corporation (Continental Europe's largest consulting engineering firm)
• Member, World Commission on the Global Dimension of Globalization Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, The Cato Institute, (USA)
• The Freedom Prize (Switzerland)
• The Fisher Prize (United Kingdom)
• CARE Humanitarian Award (Canada)