In the early 1980s, John Bohn, now CIPE's Chairman, met up with a straight-talking economist from Peru who was making waves with his theories on economic development. "This visionary, a young fellow named Hernando de Soto, was shaking up the establishment because he wasn't afraid to think 'outside the box'," Bohn remembers.
Nearly two decades later, de Soto is still thinking "outside the box" and attracting attention with his groundbreaking ideas. In a special edition of Time magazine in May 1999 on "Leaders for the New Millennium," he was chosen as one of the five leading innovators of the century. Fortune magazine, in its 60th anniversary edition, identified de Soto as one of the 50 most stimulating world leaders and thinkers of the 1990s. And The Economist ranked de Soto's public policy center, the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD), as the second most important think tank in the world.
CIPE has played an important role over the years in helping other countries to apply de Soto's ideas. In 1987, CIPE sponsored a conference entitled "Building Constituencies for Economic Change" to introduce de Soto's ideas to an international audience. Some 250 policymakers from 35 countries attended the event.
Through the ILD, de Soto continues to develop and implement strategies for bringing informal enterprises and property ownership into the mainstream, promoting economic development, and raising the standard of living of people in developing economies around the world.