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  • The 2017 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research goes to Hernando de Soto

    The 2017 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research goes to Hernando de Soto

    The Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research is the most prominent international award in entrepreneurship research with a price sum of EUR 100,000. De Soto’s analyses have had tremendous influence on policy throughout the world and were a main source of inspiration for the World Bank’s Doing Business program. Read More
  • 2017 Award Winner

    2017 Award Winner

    Hernando de Soto Peru  Institute for Liberty and Democracy For developing a new understanding of the institutions that underpin the informal economy as well as the role of property rights and entrepreneurship in converting the informal economy into the formal sector.   Read More
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ILD in the News

Businesswire

June 25, 2015 12:00 PM

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--BitFury Group, the leading Bitcoin Blockchain infrastructure provider and transaction processing company added Dr. James Newsome, ex-Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and former CEO of the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and Hernando de Soto, the President of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD), to its advisory board.

Hernando de Soto Polar, a Peruvian economist known for his work on the informal economy and on the importance of business and property rights, in his book El Otro Sendero (1986) (published in English in 1989 as The Other Path) argues that excessive regulation in the Peruvian (and other Latin American) countries forced a large part of the economies into informality and thus stifling economic development.

svdThomas Pikettys ”Kapitalet i det tjugoförsta århundradet” har väckt uppmärksamhet över hela världen inte för dess korståg mot ojämlikhet – många av oss ägnar sig åt det – utan på grund av dess centrala tes, som bygger på hans tolkning av 18- och 1900-talen: att kapitalet ”mekaniskt producerar godtyckliga, ohållbara ojämlikheter”, som oundvikligen leder världen till fattigdom, våld och krig – något som kommer att fortsätta under detta århundrade.

Brave New CoinPosted by B Holmes on 19 June 2015

In 2000, revered Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto published The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, a study on the relationship between poverty and property rights. In the book De Soto claims approximately $9 trillion is tied up in land, homes and businesses belonging to people who do not have deeds or titles.

Peter Kirby, CEO and founder of Factom, draws inspiration from De Soto and endeavours to make an impact in the land title arena. “Land Title corruption is a very common problem in the developing world and a immutable ledger solution could help these economies move forward dramatically.”

According to the USAid and Tenure website approximately 80% of privately held land in Honduras is untitled or improperly titled. “Only 14% of Hondurans legally occupy properties and, of the properties held legally, only 30% are registered.”  The ongoing land title disputes in Honduras have lead to violence, environmental abuse, and the displacement of indigenous people.

fdWhilst the books by inequality gurus Piketty and Atkinson are selling by the millions, less attention is paid to an arguably more important work on global inequality. Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto does something which most economists seem to dislike: he gets his hands dirty by actually visiting the countries that he studies.

Torturing
Instead of torturing the data on income or wealth until they finally admit to be unfair, De Soto simply travels to Egypt and ask the people themselves. Not a bad idea, because it becomes clear, pretty much immediately, that the data on capital that Piketty and Atkinson use are completely irrelevant for the developing world.

Developing countries
As an inhabitant of a (relative to Western countries) poor country himself, De Soto knows very well that official statistics on capital don’t sketch an honest picture. Extrapolating official or Western data is just meaningless. If you want to know what is going on in those countries you got to go there. And when you do, as De Soto did, you will find out that capital works fundamentally different in Egypt than in – say – France.

Virgin - RichardBy Richard Branson          16 June 2015

Some of the greatest discoveries, innovations and inventions have come about by chance encounters. But they wouldn’t have happened if the environment to stimulate chance encounters wasn’t created.

That is the thinking behind bringing so many fascinating entrepreneurial minds to Necker, and nurturing an environment of collaboration, discussion and excitement.

We recently hosted the Blockchain Summit, a four-day gathering of digital innovators that was organised by the team behind the MaiTai gatherings. It was fascinating debating new developments in the industry and mapping out what the future holds.

Bush tells me about Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist who specializes in the so-called informal economy (removed from taxes and government oversight). The economist documented frustrations of entrepreneurs across the globe whose innovations are crushed by crony capitalism and government monopolies, including a Tunisian man who in 2013 set himself afire in protest. “We’re not Tunisia by any stretch of the imagination,” Bush says, but “we’re getting more and more complicated.”

Die Welt

Der Star-Ökonom Thomas Piketty hat die Kapitalismuskritik weltweit befeuert – aber leider mit falschen Zahlen. Ein Fachkollege rechnet ihm vor, wie Armut wirklich schwindet.

Von Hernando de Soto   07.06.15

Mit seinem Buch "Das Kapital im 21. Jahrhundert" hat Thomas Piketty weltweit Aufmerksamkeit erregt. Nicht, weil er darin gegen Ungleichheit zu Felde zieht – das tun viele von uns –, sondern wegen dessen zentraler These, die auf seiner Analyse des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts beruht: Kapital produziere "automatisch willkürliche und unhaltbare Ungleichheiten", die unweigerlich Armut, Gewalt und Kriege zur Folge hätten – auch im aktuellen Jahrhundert noch.

TWT4 June 2015
By Michael Matheson Miller

One of the governing narratives about poverty is that the world's poor are dominated by markets and that justice requires they be protected from competition and the ups and downs of a market economy. This is widely promoted by everyone from development professionals to religious leaders, but this perhaps one of clearest cases of getting something almost entirely wrong. The poor are not dominated by markets. They are excluded from markets.

LaMula 1Expertos analizan sistema Blockchain

2015-05-28

Influyentes personalidades del mundo de los capitales de riesgo, las finanzas y la tecnología, han sido invitadas por el magnate inglés y fundador del Grupo Virgin, Sir Richard Branson, a participar en la Cumbre Mundial sobre el Sistema Blockchain, una plataforma de información que permite realizar transacciones a bajo costo a nivel global, con un elevado nivel de seguridad y que proyecta convertirse en el centro de la economía y la sociedad del futuro.

LaNacion ArARGENTINA Lunes 25 de mayo de 2015

Eurocentrismo

La tesis de El capital en el siglo XXI es errada, dice el autor, y señala que el ya célebre economista francés que lo escribió no advierte que en los países en vías de desarrollo el problema no es el capital, sino su carencia

Por Hernando de Soto | Para LA NACION

LIMA.- La obra de Thomas Piketty El capital en el siglo XXI concitó interés a nivel mundial no porque emprenda con ella una cruzada contra la injusticia social -somos muchos los que lo hacemos-, sino porque, basándose en sus lecturas de los siglos XIX y XX, enarbola la siguiente tesis central: "El capital produce mecánicamente desigualdades arbitrarias e insostenibles" que conducen al mundo a la miseria, la violencia y las guerras y continuará haciéndolo en este siglo.

NRCRubriek: Opinie
NRC Reader, Hernando de Soto
Amsterdam , 23-05-2015

De econoom Piketty kijkt alleen naar officiële cijfers en gaat zo voorbij aan het onofficiële bezit. Zogenaamd „werklozen” verdienen eraan, constateert Hernando de Soto.

In zijn bestseller Kapitaal in de 21e eeuw trekt Thomas Piketty de aandacht met de stelling dat het kapitaal „automatisch willekeurige en onverdraaglijke ongelijkheden veroorzaakt die de wereld in ellende, geweld en oorlogen stort.” Die stelling is onjuist, toont onderzoek aan dat ik met mijn teams heb uitgevoerd. De mensen vechten niet tegen kapitaal maar zoeken het juist op.

ILDIn The Mystery of Capital Hernando de Soto showed how legal property rights are the sine qua non for unleashing the economic potential of assets, for wealth creation. As it turns out, Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the world, is about to register property rights by using blockchain, part of the bitcoin technology. Blockchain’s transparent digital transfer public ledger system of ownership could bring the poorest people in Honduras out of poverty by both documenting their property rights and giving those rights the necessary characteristics to carry out different economic functions.

The Independent

Thomas Piketty’s book Capital In The Twenty-First Century has attracted worldwide attention, not because he crusades against inequality –many of us do that– but because of its central thesis, based on his reading of the 19th and 20th centuries, that capital “mechanically produces arbitrary, unsustainable inequalities”, inevitably leading the world to misery, violence and wars and will continue to do so in this century.

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