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What We Do

ILD: What We Do

For some 25 years, ILD teams have walked the streets and rural byways of poor nations, observing and analyzing how ordinary people operate in the shadows of a burdensome and discriminatory legal system. ILD researchers go deep into the grassroots of the extralegal sector of each country, talk to local leaders and entrepreneurs, observing them at work, following their transactions, and like experienced paleontologists who see ancient dinosaurs where the rest of us see only piles of rocks, they identify hidden patterns of social interaction: how transactions are conducted, how records are kept, how people are identified, what works (and what doesn't) --while simultaneously analyzing the barriers of the existing legal framework. The economic, social and political context of the existing legal framework is also examined, analyzing what role tribal affinity, feudal obligations, mercantilism, and corruption might play in exclusion. The result is a fact-based view of extralegality and a country-specific Program for reform that can assist developing and post-Soviet countries in merging their two economies --the extralegal and legal-- into one inclusive market economy.

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