Global Policy Dialogue with Hernando de Soto - The Global Challenge: No Facts

Event Date
Location
LSE, London

Date:  Friday 15 October 2010 
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue:  Old Theatre, Old Building
Speaker: Hernando de Soto
Chair: Professor David Held

The Global Policy dialogues are a unique series of exchanges bringing together today's most preeminent scholars and practitioners to discuss pressing questions of policy, with the aim of advancing our understanding of the underlying issues and offering innovative solutions to global challenges.

Hernando de Soto is currently President of the ILD —headquartered in Lima, Peru— considered by The Economist as one of the two most important think tanks in the world. Time magazine chose him as one of the five leading Latin American innovators of the century in its special May 1999 issue "Leaders for the New Millennium", and included him among the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004. In its 85th anniversary edition, Forbes named Mr de Soto as one of 15 innovators "who will reinvent your future". In January 2000, Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit, the German development magazine, described Mr de Soto as one of the most important development theoreticians of the last millennium. In October 2005, over 20,000 readers of Prospect magazine of the UK and Foreign Policy of the US ranked him among the top 13 "public intellectuals" in the world from the magazines' joint list of 100.

Mr de Soto has served as an economist for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, as President of the Executive Committee of the Copper Exporting Countries Organization (CIPEC), as CEO of Universal Engineering Corporation (Continental Europe's largest consulting engineering firm), as a principal of the Swiss Bank Corporation Consultant Group, and as a governor of Peru's Central Reserve Bank.

Currently, Mr 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-chairs with former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright the Commission on Legal Empowerment for the Poor.

Mr de Soto has published two books about economic and political development: The Other Path , in the mid- 1980s, and at the end of 2000, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else . Both books have been international bestsellers – translated into some 20 languages.