Hernando de Soto is a famous Peruvian economist, author and property rights advocate.
Education
Educated in Switzerland before returning to Peru in 1979 at the age of 38, Hernando de Soto attended the International School of Geneva.
H. de Soto attended the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva (Switzerland) to complete his post graduate work.
Career
In 1981, de Soto and a group of colleagues decided to create a non-profit organization to investigate Peru’s business and property sectors, including the “shadow economy.” They called it Instituto Libertad y Democracia (Institute for Liberty and Democracy). Over the next decade the ILD became a vocal and active proponent of the power of Peru’s poor to make a major economic contribution to their country’s general prosperity, once they had the legal property and business rights required to prosper. The ILD also designed a series of practical reforms and helped draft the appropriate laws to bring the poor from the shadow economy into the rule of law.
The ILD has had invitations from more than 30 heads of state/governments of developing countries to help them create inclusive market economies. In recent years, the ILD has worked with the governments of Tanzania, Mexico, Albania and Ethiopia to formalize their “extralegal” property and business sectors. In 2007, the ILD partnered with the Inter-American Development Bank to do a preliminary diagnosis of the informal economies of 12 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. The institute currently has on the table a reform project to work in Niger, Senegal, Mali, and Cape Verde, which is supported by the Spanish government.
Hernando de Soto’s ideas and the ILD’s work have been praised by world leaders – across the political spectrum – from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to Bill Clinton, Kofi Annan, Alan Greenspan, and Nobel Laureates Milton Friedman and Ronald Coase. President Clinton, for example, has described the ILD’s work as “The most promising anti-poverty initiative in the world.”
In the early 1990s, he attempted to insert Peru into the global economy; and, with his ILD team, drafted and promoted more than 187 laws that gave the poorest Peruvians access to economic opportunities, including title to their property and businesses; and created the national office of Ombudsman to defend the constitutional and human rights of the Peruvian people. Currently, H. de Soto, together with his colleagues at the ILD, is focused on designing and implementing capital formation programs to empower the poor in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and former Soviet nations. Some 30 heads of state have invited him to carry out these ILD programs in their countries. He also co‐chaired with former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, and currently serves as honorary co‐chair on various boards and organizations, including the World Justice Project.