ORGANIZATION
Institute for Liberty and Democracy
The Lima-based think tank de Soto founded in 1980 to conduct empirical research on informal economies and design institutional reforms that extend property rights to the excluded.
The Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD) has been the operational vehicle for de Soto's four-decade project of documenting and reforming the institutional infrastructure that excludes the poor from formal capitalism. The Institute conducts its own fieldwork rather than relying on government statistics, producing empirical research that has informed property rights reform in more than thirty countries. Its 289-day business registration experiment in Lima became the canonical demonstration of institutional friction. The Institute's methodology — counting informal assets, measuring registration costs, documenting institutional barriers — has produced quantitative foundations for policy reform that theoretical development economics had not supplied. In recent years, the Institute has extended its work into digital infrastructure, including blockchain-based property registries relevant to the AI economy's representational gap.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Founded in 1980 in Lima, the ILD emerged during a period of acute political crisis in Peru. Shining Path guerrilla violence was intensifying, economic conditions were deteriorating, and the informal economy