Newsletter September 2007

The prestigious Swiss-German editorial, Orell Füssli, placed Hernando de Soto as one most important economists in the world in its new book The twelve most important economists of all time. De Soto shares this distinction with Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, León Walras, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich August von Hayek, Peter Drucker, Milton Friedman, John Forbes Nash, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz. Out of the twelve, only de Soto, Nash, Sen and Stiglitz are still alive today.

Front cover of The twelve most important economists of all time.

De Soto has spent years studying the underground economies of poor people around the world. He thinks that the best way to help the poor would be to bring them and their assets into the formal economy. Poor people comprise two thirds of the world population. De Soto estimates the value of poor people’s extralegal property, from cinderblock homes to black market street sales, at $10 trillion. Poor people are excluded from the formal economy by oligarchies and massive red tape. De Soto is convinced that incorporating them into the legal system would eclipse all previous development efforts.

Hernando de Soto walking through poor areas.

Hernando de Soto has been praised and recognized internationally many times in the past. In the 1999 Time magazine special issue Leaders of the New Millennium, de Soto was considered one of the five leading Latin American innovators of the century, as well as included among the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004. In the 85th anniversary edition of Forbes magazine, de Soto was named one of the 15 innovators “who will reinvent your future”. Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit, the German development magazine, described de Soto as one of the most important development theoreticians of the last millennium. In 2005, the United Kingdom's Prospect magazine and American Foreign Policy magazine ranked de Soto among the top 13 "public intellectuals" in the world. He has also been recognized by U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. Hernando de Soto is an inspiration for many and will continue to represent Peru with pride.

Source: livinginperu.com

PAST NEWSLETTERS:

• Newsletter December 2007
• Newsletter November 2007
• Newsletter October 2007
• Newsletter September 2007
• Newsletter August 2007
• Newsletter July 2007
• Newsletter June 2007
• Newsletter May 2007
• Newsletter April 2007
• Newsletter March 2007
• Newsletter February 2007
• Newslette January 2007