The Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD), led by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, works with developing countries to implement property and business rights reforms that provide the legal tools and institutions required for citizens to participate in the formal national and global economy. ILD works toward a world in which all people have equal access to secure rights to their real property and business assets in order to pull themselves—and their countries—out of poverty.
No nation can have a strong market economy with most of its people on the outside looking in. Massive exclusion generates two parallel economies, legal an extralegal, where the majority of entrepreneurs are stuck in poverty with assets estimated to be more than US$ 10 trillion worldwide languishing as dead capital in the shadows of the law.