Hernando De Soto Economist Quotes

Peruvian economist and anti-poverty campaigner Hernando de Soto estimates that the amount of “dead capital,” the pool of untitled property around the world, is worth about $20 trillion. If poor people could use that capital as collateral, he says, the multiplier effect from all that credit flowing through the global economy could create growth rates in excess of 10 percent in developing countries, which account for more than half of world GDP. And it’s not just land. This technology has kindled interest in how to help the poor prove ownership of a much wider array of assets, such as small business equipment and vehicles, as well as reliably show their personal good standing on questions such as creditworthiness and make sure their votes are counted.

If you are committed to economic development in your country, should terror suddenly erupt, you cannot just stand on the sidelines claiming that you are an economist or a lawyer or businessman without any expertise in political violence. You have an obligation to use your professional training to try to understand the economic and legal reasons why poor people take tip arms and then identify ways of using that bitterness and anger against the status quo to create an efficient legal sys- tenm under which everyone can prosper.

academic literature. Major influences on my thinking include Douglass North, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on institutions; the pre-eminent economist of modern Africa, Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion and Plundered Planet; Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist and author of The Mystery of Capital; Andrei Shleifer and his numerous co-authors, who have pioneered an economic approach to the comparative study of legal systems; and Jim Robinson and Daron Acemoglu, whose book Why Nations Fail asks similar questions to the ones that interest me.