The mystery of capital : why capitalism triumphs in the west and fails everywhere else

The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else is a book about the persistence of poverty in developing countries. In strong opposition to the popular view that success is determined by cultural differences, de Soto finds that it actually has to do with the legal structure of property. Every developed nation in the world at one time went through the transformation from predominantly informal, extralegal ownership to a formal, unified legal property system, but in the West it was forgotten that creating this system is also what allowed people everywhere to leverage property into wealth. De Soto speaks about "dead capital" that cannot be used to its full potential. "Imagine a country," writes De Soto, "where nobody can identify who owns what, addresses cannot be verified, people cannot be made to pay their debts, resources cannot be conveniently turned into money, ownership cannot be divided into shares, descriptions of assets are not standardized and cannot be easily compared, and the rules that govern property vary from neighborhood to neighborhood or even from street to street."