The Power of the Poor

On October 8, PBS will braodcast The Power of the Poor, a new documentary featuring Hernando de Soto, among my favorite economists. The documentary was produced by the same team that brought us Milton Friedman’s classic documentary series Free to Choose. Below is a preview of what to expect:

The Power of the Poor will demonstrate “how free markets, individual freedom and especially the right to property can transform the poor into the most powerful resource in the world. At its heart is the potential triumph of capitalism as a system.”

Click here to read my previous post on the ideas of Hernando do Soto.

The Invisible Economy

Jeremy Main of Fortune Magazine writes,

The underground economy, also called the informal, invisible, or black economy, is regarded around the world as a refuge of drug traffickers, smugglers, and tax evaders. Now a new view is taking hold: At least in the Third World, the underground economy is mainly good, not bad. It embodies the entrepreneurial energy of ordinary people striving in admirable ways to break out of poverty. It comprises thousands of craftsmen, storekeepers, truck and bus drivers, and food vendors whose operations would be perfectly legal in the U.S. but whose governments force them to ply their trades illegally. The underground economy is part of the solution, not the problem. If this entrepreneurial spirit were legalized and nurtured rather than fettered and suppressed, goes the argument, a burst of competitive energy would be released. Living standards, which have been dropping in much of the Third World, would start rising. International trade would increase, and developing countries could service their huge and debilitating external debts more easily.

Using data from the World Bank’s 2002 World Development Report, Peruvian Economist Hernando de Soto calculates that,

The total value of real estate held but not legally owned by the poor of the developing world is at least $9.3 trillion.

He estimates that the total amount of land informally or illegally held is 85% of total urban land holdings and 53% of total rural land holdings. By assigning a fair market value to all this informally held land, the grand total comes to $9.3 trillion-more than the total value of all the companies listed on the New York, Tokyo and London stock exchanges.

De Soto also points out that,

In Argentina, according to Marcos Victorica of the Institute of Contemporary Studies, an economic research organization, the unreported, informal economy last year produced $50.4 billion, vs. the official GNP of some $70 billion.

In Kenya the lethal minibuses called matatus that cruise around Nairobi are the most colorful expression of the unofficial economy, which the ministry of planning says contributes about 35% to the country’s GNP.

He explains,

Extra legal businesses are taxed by the lack of good property law and continually having to hide their operations from the authorities. Because they are not incorporated, extralegal entrepreneurs cannot lure investors by selling shares; they cannot get low interest formal credit because they do not even have legal addresses. They cannot reduce risks by declaring limited liability or obtaining insurance coverage. In fact, the only ‘insurance’ available to them is that provided by their neighbors and the protection that local bullies or mafia are willing to sell them. Moreover, because extralegal entrepreneurs live in constant fear of government detection and extortion from corrupt officials, they are forced to split and compartmentalize their production facilities between many locations, thereby rarely achieving important economies of scale. With one eye always on the lookout for police, underground entrepreneurs cannot openly advertise to build up their clientèle or make less costly bulk deliveries to customers.

Ultimately, De Soto concludes,

Most people do not resort to the extralegal sector because it is a tax haven but because existing law, however elegantly written, does not address their needs or aspirations. In Peru, where my team designed the program for bringing small extralegal entrepreneurs into the legal system, some 276,000 of those entrepreneurs recorded their businesses voluntarily in new registry offices we set up to accommodate them – with no promise of tax reductions. Their underground businesses had paid no taxes at all. Four years later, tax revenue from formerly extralegal businesses totaled US$1.2 billion.

Informal Economy as percentage of GNP (follow link for complete data):

For more on the invisible economy, Capitalism’s struggle in the developing world, and property rights, I would highly recommend reading Hernando do Soto’s The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else.

Economic Freedom and the Average Size of the Informal Economy