Hernando De Research Articles

The Promise and Peril of Property Rights Formalization

Free trade, free markets, and international investment are the paths to prosperity, but despite widespread adoption of these staples of the Washington Consensus more than 1.2 billion people still live on less than $1 per day. The search for determining the missing factor beyond these orthodox remedies for relieving poverty has led some to conclude that it is the growth of local capital markets built on robust, formalized property rights regimes that has led to uneven rates of economic development. This paper offers a critique of this hypothesis put forward in the property rights formalization literature, in particular Hernando de Soto’s work The Mystery of Capital that sparked popular interest in the field.De Soto generally has one big idea per book. In The Other Path, he argued that the reason that informal economies existed was the large degree of bureaucracy in developing countries that forced small businesses to stay unregistered, and caused land to be untitled. The big idea behind The Mystery of Capital is that formalized, state-sanctioned property rights generate capital and promote economic development, as seen in the relative success of the legal systems of developed countries that have formalized their informal economies. This formalization allowed property to generate capital and grow developed economies. The explicit argument then is; if it worked for the West, it will work for the rest. In essence, De Soto and his compatriots argue that “This [formalized property] is the mystery of capital. Solving it requires an understanding of why Westerners, by representing assets with titles, are able to see and draw out capital from them.” Formalizing property rights is a popular idea. Endorsements range from Ronald Coase, Milton Friedman, Francis Fukayama, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, to David Owen, and Margaret Thatcher. Bill Clinton publicly declared that de Soto was “probably the world’s most important living economist” for his work on property rights formalization. Even the World Bank now largely agrees with de Soto’s analysis, stating that “[l]and is a key asset for the rural and urban poor.” The goal of this paper is to determine whether such widespread praise for property rights formalization is justified based on an analysis of the available empirical literature on the subject. Particular attention will be paid to the importance of considering the various derivations of property rights in culturally relative terms.The paper is structured as follows. Part I offers a general introduction to the property rights formalization literature, along with de Soto’s thesis and primary claims. Part II critiques de Soto’s methodology and data. Part III compares de Soto’s results with those of other empirical studies measuring the efficacy of property rights formalization. Part IV focuses on how these lessons have been applied using a case study from Indonesia and examples from South Africa. Finally, Part V summarizes the promise and perils of property rights formalization. In conclusion, property rights formalization does hold the promise of unlocking capital and spurring economic development, but reform must be both comprehensive and culturally relative considering the unique cultural, social, and political heritage of the societies in question.

New worlds of violence: cultures and conquests in the early American Southeast

From the early 1500s to the mid-1700s, the American Southeast was the scene of continuous tumult as European powers vied for dominance in the region while waging war on Native American communities. Yet even before Hernando de Soto landed his expeditionary force on the Gulf shores of Florida, Native Americans had created their own cultures of violence: sets of ideas about when it was appropriate to use violence what sorts of violence were appropriate to a given situation. In New Worlds of Violence, Matthew Jennings offers a persuasive new framework for understanding the European Native American contact period the conflicts among indigenous peoples that preceded it. This pioneering approach posits that every group present in the Southeast had its own ideas about the use of violence that these ideas changed over time as they collided with one another. book starts with the Mississippian era continues through the successive Spanish English invasions of the Native South. Jennings argues that the English conquered the Southeast because they were able to force everyone else to adapt to their culture of violence, which, of course, changed over time as well. By 1740, a peculiarly Anglo-American culture of violence was in place that would profoundly influence the expansion of England s colonies the eventual southern United States. While Native African violence were present in this world, they moved in circles defined by the English. New Worlds of Violence concludes by pointing out that long-lasting violence bears long-lasting consequences. An important contribution to the growing body of work on the early Southeast, this book will significantly broaden readers understanding of America s violent past. Matthew Jennings is an assistant professor of history at Macon State College in Macon, Georgia. He is the author of Violence in a Shattered World in Mapping the Shatter Zone: European Invasion the Transformation of the Mississippian World, edited by Robbie Ethridge Sheri Shuck-Hall. His work has also appeared in The Uniting States, South Carolina Encyclopedia, A Multicultural History of the United States, and Encyclopedia of Native American History.

Legalizando la Ciudad:Asentamientos Informalesy Procesos de Regularizacion en Tijuana by Tito Alegria and Gerardo Ordonez El Colegio de la Frontera Norte

Galvanized by the arguments of Hernando De Soto (1980 and 2000), the international development community and many academics have pushed land titling as an essential way to help the people of low-income settlements around the world. However, research has demonstrated that the act of defining property rights is problematic: there are often multiple property rights systems operating in any given place (Payne 2002) and the act of defining rights can generate conflict and violence (Alston et al. 1999). Thus, studying the process of land titling is especially important at the present time. Mexico has one of the longest running and most ambitious land regularization programs, making it an obvious place for research. In Legalizando la Ciudad, Tito Alegria and Gerardo Ordonez present an exemplary case study of land regularization in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico. It is unfortunate that the book is only available in Spanish, as it is rich in data and historical analysis of the institutions of land regularization.

Incentives and the De Soto Effect

This paper explores the consequences of improving property rights to facilitate the use of fixed assets as collateral, popularly attributed to the influential policy advocate Hernando de Soto. We use an equilibrium model of a credit market with moral hazard to characterize the theoretical effects and also develop a quantitative analysis using data from Sri Lanka. We show that the effects are likely to be nonlinear and heterogeneous by wealth group. They also depend on the extent of competition between lenders. There can be significant increases in profits and reductions in interest rates when credit markets are competitive. However, since these are due to reductions in moral hazard, that is, increased effort, the welfare gains tend to be modest when cost of effort is taken into account. Allowing for an extensive margin where borrowers gain access to the credit market can make these effects larger depending on the underlying wealth distribution.

PROTOCOL: The Impact of Land Property Rights Interventions on Agricultural Productivity in Developing Countries: A Systematic Review

PROTOCOL: The Impact of Land Property Rights Interventions on Agricultural Productivity in Developing Countries: A Systematic Review

Hernando de los Ríos Coronel and the Spanish Philippines in the Golden Age by John Newsome Crossley (review)

Review(s) of: Hernando de los Rios Coronel and the Spanish Philippines in the golden age, by Crossley, John Newsome, Farnham, Ashgate, 2011, hardback, pp. 260, 5 tables, R.R.P. 65.00 pounds, ISBN 9781409425649; Stuart women playwrights, 1613-1713, by Cuder-Dom nguez, Pilar, (Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama), Farnham, Ashgate, 2010, hardback, pp. 158, R.R.P. 50.00 pounds, ISBN 9780754667131.

Addenda a la biografía de los Ballesteros: nuevas aportaciones documentales

This papers covers all the news novel about the life and work of the silversmiths Hernando de Ballesteros el Viejo and his son Hernando de Ballesteros el Mozo, which were not included in our earlier work entitled Los Ballesteros, una familia de plateros en la Sevilla del Quinientos.

Antonio de Cabezón y el comienzo de la música didáctica para tecla con valor artístico

Con las Obras de música para tecla, arpa y vihuela de Antonio y Hernando de Cabezón tenemos en las manos uno de los ejemplos más antiguos de método para instrumentos, que reúne la lógica didáctica con el alto nivel artístico. Fuera de eso, en las composiciones “para principiantes”, no se cumple mecánicamente el principio “de lo sencillo a lo dificil”, sino que Cabezón, en primer plano, concibe las posibilidades, esboza los espacios de juego y las libertades, en vez de traspasar demasiado sistemáticamente un espacio limitado por reglas. La distancia de los métodos contemporáneos para tecla, respecto a la calidad, justifica con ello, la valoración, que con este método se nos ha puesto en las manos, el primer ejemplo de música didáctica para tecla con valor artístico – 150 años antes de las correspondientes obras de Johann Sebastian Bach y 250 años antes del Álbum para la juventud de Robert Schumann.

From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540-1715

Scholars once referred to the years spanning 1540 to 1715 as part of the forgotten centuries in the Native American history of the South. In recent years, however, archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians have shed more light on this period's history, and Robbie Ethridge has done a service in compiling and synthesizing all the new work into one much-needed volume. She has also contributed some original research of her own, and the book as a whole represents a refreshing conceptualization. Ethridge's theme is one of transformation: she shows how southern Native Americans, from Mississippian times to the early eighteenth century, changed and restructured their societies under the weight of a European invasion. Within what she calls the Mississippian shatter zone, natives faced the devastating Hernando de Soto expedition in the 1540s, the advent of horrific Old World diseases, the introduction of the Spanish mission system, and periodic entanglement in colonial wars as the Spanish, French, and English fought for control of the region. Yet Ethridge claims that European trade, notably the Indian slave trade, served as the most destructive force and greatest impetus for change among southern natives. She helps illustrate this fact by using the Chickasaws—descendants of the Mississippian chiefdom of Chicaza—as a focus group. In reaction to the turmoil going on around them and the need for European trade goods (including guns), the Chickasaws became a “militaristic slaving society” (p. 155), preying on neighboring tribes to supply the Europeans with captive laborers. Here Ethridge makes another important contribution to our understanding of Indian life in the South by tying the collapse of the Mississippian chiefdoms and the creation of the coalescent Indian confederacies of the eighteenth century—including Choctaws, Creeks, and Chickasaws—to the emerging world economy in which the South was a “strategic outpost” supplying the core capitalist countries of Europe, most notably England, with “labor and resources” (p. 90). Too often, historians have neglected the world systems concept as an integrating technique that enables world and American history to be linked together for a better understanding of each.

Imperial Lyric: New Poetry and New Subjects in Early Modern Spain (review)

Reviewed by: Imperial Lyric: New Poetry and New Subjects in Early Modern Spain Maria Cristina Quintero Middlebrook, Leah. Imperial Lyric: New Poetry and New Subjects in Early Modern Spain. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2009. 197 pp. In the introduction to this intelligent and elegantly written book, Leah Middlebrook tells us that "the scholarly conversation about early European and global modernity has yet to fully 'place' the significance of Spain and Spanish cultural production" (1). Indeed. The continued exclusion of Spanish literature from major studies that purport to deal with the "European" Renaissance is a source of frustration to Hispanists and bespeaks an almost willful ignorance, if not intellectual laziness, on the part of many scholars. One can only hope that Middlebrook's book will be read and reviewed outside the sphere of Hispanism, as it contributes significantly to an understanding of the richness and excellence of poetic production during the 1500s in Spain. Middlebrook engages only briefly with the most celebrated sixteenth-century Spanish poet, Garcilaso de la Vega, but she does bring to the fore less-studied but important figures such as Francisco de Aldana, Hernando de Acuña, Gutierre de Cetina, and Cristóbal de Castillejo, in addition to the better known Juan Boscán and Fernando de Herrera. These were all able practitioners of the new short lyric, adapted from Italian sources, that flourished in Renaissance Spain. Middlebrook is a perceptive reader of poetry, but what is most original in her book is that the consideration of the work by these poets becomes also a study of politics, identity, subjectivity, and notions of masculinity in Spain. The book consists of four chapters, each divided into brief sections, and a coda. Throughout, in lucid and detailed close readings, the author pays close attention to form—the structure of the sonnet, tropes, rhyme patterns, elisions, etc.—while at the same time commenting on the politics of form. She is singularly adept at demonstrating how the practice and legitimation of the short lyric, especially the [End Page 508] sonnet, took place in tandem with the symbolic and actual transformation (and ultimate diminution) of the modern courtier's access to power and agency. We encounter in this poetry "the deliberate conflation of notions regarding kinds of poetry and kinds of men" (59). The new lyric, therefore, became a virtual emblem of state and imperial power; and this book traces how two generations of poets confronted the pressures and challenges presented by the consolidation of Habsburg absolutism. Middlebrook displays her talent for original readings early on in the introduction where the reader is treated to a dazzling analysis of Francisco de Aldana's Sonnet 45 ("Otro aquí no se ve que, frente a frente"). The poem portrays the aftermath of a brutal battle, and the mangled bodies of soldiers represent for Middlebrook a "reversal of Petrarchan expression … an anti-blazon" (9). In the first chapter, "Sonnetization: Acuña, Boscán, Castillejo, and the Politics of Form," the author demonstrates how the lyric rose in prestige within the context of a transformation of ideas about masculinity. Basing herself on the work of Norbert Elias, among others, Middlebrook examines two sonnets by Acuña that illustrate the change from an idealized notion of the noble warrior into a tamed courtier. These intensely self-reflective poems about the modern subject's dependency on discourse mirror the poet's submission to linguistic as well as political authority. In this chapter, the author also provides a new look at the importance of Boscán's famous 1526 letter to the Duchess of Soma, where the poet situates the era of the Reconquest firmly in the past and replaces old-style militaristic values with new codes of self-restraint and rational self-subjection. As a companion piece, Middlebrook studies Castillejo's "Reprensión contra los poetas que escriben en metro italiano," a humorous invective against writers who had abandoned the traditional Castilian forms. In Chapter Two, "Otro tiempo lloré y ahora canto: Juan Boscán Courtierizes Song," Middlebrook turns to the peculiar set of cultural and subjective meanings implied by Boscán's use of "song." She tells us that the Obras de Juan Boscán y...

Formalisation: An Interview with Hernando de Soto

AbstractThe Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto is internationally renowned for his writings on the informal economy. Through his work as the President of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD) in Lima, he has effectively advocated the creation of a legal system to help the poor access property rights. In his latest book, The Amazon is not Avatar, he makes a significant shift away from the problems caused by massive urban migrations to cities to focusing on the benefits of property and business rights for resource‐rich indigenous communities in the Amazon. Angus Laurie interviews De Soto on his current thinking and highlights why he has had such an important influence on social housing in Latin America. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A Discursive Dominance Theory of Economic Reform Sustainability: The Case of India

This article hypothesizes that economic reforms become sustainable when the discursive conditions prevailing in society tip against the existing paradigm under exceptional circumstances. Thus, unless the pro-liberalization constituencies dominate the development discourse, economic reforms, initiated under the exigencies of crisis and conditionalities, or carried out by a convinced executive with or without the stimulus of a crisis, will be reversed. The discursive conditions are determined based on eight factors: the dominant view of international intellectuals, illustrative country cases, executive orientations, political will, the degree and the perceived causes of economic crisis, attitudes on the part of donor agencies, and the perceived outcomes of economic reforms. The paper seeks to prove this “discursive dominance” hypothesis for the Indian case through a cross-temporal, comparative review of the evolution of economic policy in India over six different phases.

The Search for Mabila: The Decisive Battle Between Hernando De Soto and Chief Tascalusa (review)

The Search for Mabila: The Decisive Battle Between Hernando De Soto and Chief Tascalusa (review)

The Search for Mabila: The Decisive Battle between Hernando de Soto and Chief Tascalusa. Vernon James Knight, Jr.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBOOK REVIEWSThe Search for Mabila: The Decisive Battle between Hernando de Soto and Chief Tascalusa. Vernon James Knight, Jr. Richard FlintRichard Flint Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Anthropological Research Volume 66, Number 3FALL 2010 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/jar.66.3.20798842 Views: 1Total views on this site © 2010 The University of New MexicoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Exploding Cities: Housing the Masses in Paris, Chicago, and Mexico City, 1850—2000

In The Mystery of Capitalism , the darling of neoliberalism, Hernando de Soto posits that secure property titles explain “why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else.” While social scientists have taken him to task for an oversimplification of the causes and remedies of poverty, historians have contributed little to this important policy debate. Applying comparative methods across time and space, such a retrospective analysis exposes serious flaws in de Soto’s thesis. Case studies of Paris, Chicago, and Mexico City covering successive, fifty-year periods support his contention that property law was the single most important factor in determining the fate of rural migrants trying to find a place to live in these exploding cities. But in each case, residential property played a far more complex role in creating the social and physical geography of the city than its simple exchange value. This article illuminates some of these alternative economic uses and embedded cultural meanings of identities of place. It also shows how urban growth machines create capital value in property for some by creating environmental injustice of substandard conditions of everyday life for others.

The Search for Mabila: The Decisive Battle between Hernando de Soto and Chief Tascalusa

The Search for Mabila: The Decisive Battle between Hernando de Soto and Chief Tascalusa

Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds (review)

Reviewed by: Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds Pauline Turner Strong (bio) Lisa Voigt. Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2008. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg. 352 pp. 5 illus., notes, index. ISBN 978-0807859445, $24.95. This theoretically sophisticated volume by a specialist in Iberian literature demonstrates the value of a broadly comparative approach to imperial representation. Astutely addressing the scarcity of serious considerations of Portuguese and Spanish narratives in the voluminous English-language scholarship on captivity, Lisa Voigt connects Iberian narratives of captivity in the New World both to their Anglo-American counterparts and to early modern accounts of Christians taken captive by Moors and Turks. The results of Voigt's disciplinary boundary crossing are salutary for scholarship on the representation of identity, alterity, and experience in both the Iberian and English imperial worlds. Considerably more centered on Iberia than on England, Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic includes close readings of the representation of captivity by three authors: the Peruvian historian el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the Chilean soldier Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, and the Brazilian friar José de Santa Rita Durão. The three case studies are framed by theoretical and comparative discussions of the circulation of representations of shipwreck and captivity throughout the early modern world. Voigt is particularly interested in the "valorization of the captive's authority and knowledge" (24) in works that predate the Scientific Revolution and the age of the novel. The focus on early claims to the authority of firsthand experience makes Writing Captivity relevant to readers interested in many forms of biographical and auto biographical writing, not only captivity narratives. Voigt opens the book with a general consideration of the connections between accounts of Old and New World captivity—connections exemplified in visual imagery, tropes, and epistemological practices that "traversed linguistic, national, and imperial borders as fluidly as the voyagers themselves" (47). In a chapter that moves from the well-known captivity narratives of Hans Staden (in Brazil) and Cabeza de Vaca (on the Gulf of Mexico) to tales of Algerian captivity in the novels of Cervantes, Voigt is particularly interested in the [End Page 560] interplay between discourses of truth and strangeness. She argues persuasively that "true histories" of shipwreck and captivity played an important role in the early modern "reconceptualization of versimilitude and the marvelous" (49). Another important theme of Writing Captivity is the "transformative power of captivity and the empowerment of the transformed captive" (105). The authors of each of Voigt's central captivity narratives—a Peruvian mestizo, a Chilean creole, and a Brazilian exile—were not all captives, but each was familiar with the travails and power of the cultural mediator. Garcilaso de la Vega, a descendant of Incan nobles, included a narrative of the captivity of Juan Ortiz in his La Florida del Inca, published in Lisbon in 1605. Captured in Florida in 1528 by the indigenous chief Hirrihigua, Juan Ortiz was, according to Garcilaso, saved from torture and death by the intervention of the chief's wife and daughters. Taken under the protection of a neighboring chief, Mucozo, Ortiz served as an intermediary between the chief and Hernando de Soto when the latter arrived in Florida in 1539, eventually becoming a guide and interpreter for the Soto expedition. Also exemplifying the transformative and empowering nature of captivity is Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán's account of his "happy captivity" in 1629 among the Mapuche (or Araucanians) of Chile. A hybrid of personal memoir and political tract, Pineda's book-length manuscript (unpublished until the nineteenth century) contains numerous digressions, including examples of Spanish treachery and cruelty that Pineda viewed as key to the continuation of Mapuche hostilities against the Spanish. As a captive, Pineda came to construct what Voigt calls a "creole identity and authority" (172)—a process that involved destabilizing boundaries between the "civilized" and the "barbarous," followed by drawing new boundaries that incorporated...

On voodoo economics: theorising relations of property, value and contemporary capitalism

This paper reflects on how we can productively theorise the contemporary treatment of property, by a range of different economic agents, as a locus for the attempted creation of economic value. Its argument is that the theorisation offered by David Harvey (1982) in The limits to capital has a continued and arguably even heightened relevance in the present-day context, but that this theorisation can be embellished with insights from the sociology of finance, particularly in regard to the power of representation. This argument is developed with reference to two parallel empirical ‘stories’ from early twenty-first century capitalism: the economist Hernando de Soto’s influential thesis about the ‘mystery of capital’ and his related policy ideas; and the attempts of western-based financiers to extract profit from companies with significant real estate assets by separating those property assets from the operational side of the businesses in question.

Catholic loyalism, service and careerism: Lewes Lewkenor's quest for favour

This article discusses one of Lewkenor's more obscure works, The Resolved Gentleman (1594 – STC 15139), in the context of Elizabethan court politics in the 1590s, with a particular emphasis on the author's own experience of dissent, exile to Catholic Spain in the 1580s and return to England in the early 1590s. A translation of Hernando de Acuna's El Caballero Determinado, itself a reworking of Olivier de la Marche's Chevalier Delibere (1483), the Resolved Gentleman bends the conventions of medieval chivalric allegory to articulate Lewkenor's own experience of alienation and dissent in the specific context of the factionalism of the 1590s. Beneath Lewkenor's seemingly self-effacing, ‘humanist’ translation it is in fact possible to discern a complex set of criticisms of Elizabeth's court. The knight's ‘wandering’ and ‘errance’ thus becomes a complex, multivalent figure that reverberates with a number of autobiographical meanings: the knight's exile becomes in Lewkenor's hands a figure of his own forced exile to Catholic Spain, and the account of the knight's quest functions as an oblique allusion to his own efforts to make his way back to Elizabeth's court. More importantly, however, these ‘personal’ meanings acquire a wider, political valence in the context of the allegory, and the narrative as a whole thus becomes a subtle, perceptive but scathing criticism of the Elizabethan court in the 1590's and the ‘contraction’ of royal favour that resulted in particular in the exclusion of capable, experienced but Catholic counsellors like Lewkenor himself. Articulating the frustration of this younger generation of alienated but fundamentally loyalist Catholics, Lewkenor paints a picture of a failed quest for favour, where the questing knight is finally forced to retire from the active life and withdraw to a rustic hermitage that is not only incompatible with his own ideal of the vita activa, but also dangerously smacks of unregenerate, and potentially seditious Catholicism.

Capitalism obscured: the limits of law and rights-based approaches to poverty reduction and development

The Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor (CLEP) was established by the United Nations in 2005 and concluded in 2008. Although inspired by Hernando de Soto's analysis of the role of property rights in economic development, the scope of the Commission was defined as ‘legal empowerment’ in general. This commentary offers a critique of the CLEP report, and argues that its underlying assumptions rest on an idealised version of liberal democratic capitalism in which a dynamic market economy assures ‘win-win’ solutions for all. This implies that there are no tensions between the four ‘pillars’ of legal empowerment identified by CLEP (the rule of law, property rights, labour rights, and business rights). However, in the real world of capitalism, in both democratic and authoritarian versions, there are structural tensions between classes of capital and classes of labour, which result in the economy and its underlying institutional order becoming a key site of contestation. The case of farm labour in rural South Africa is used to illustrate this argument. A focus on legal rights can, however, be ‘empowering’ to a degree, when it helps defend poor people from exploitation and abuse, or is located within broader strategies to eradicate systemic poverty.