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14.04. Porto Alegre. Latin American Colloquia Cycle Instituto Liberdade – 1st Edition

                  Latin American Colloquia Cycle Instituto Liberdade – 1st Edition                                                                       

       Red Liberal de América Latina, Instituto Friedrich Naumann para a Liberdade 

                    Theme: “Property Rights as a tool to reduce Poverty”

Date: April 14^th, 2010

Venue: Building 50 – Auditorium on the 9^th floor – Faculty of Business Administration, Economics and Accounting (FACE) of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul; address: Av. Ipiranga 6681, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil

The seminar will be conducted in Spanish and Portuguese.

                                                           Rationale

In developed countries, its people enjoy the rule of law—where property, identity, and businesses all are legally defined and documented. This system is responsible for their staggering prosperity.

The overwhelming majority of humanity lives in a world without this invisible architecture that lets us live, work, and prosper as few in human history ever have. Not only are they lacking these beneficial tools, they must often trade and create value in the face of unnecessary bureaucratic obstacles that de Soto refers to as the “paper wall.”

De Soto says: “Four billion of the world’s six billion, many of them with assets – homes and businesses – and eager to improve their life chances in the larger markets are outside the rule of law. Those four billion have little chance of success because discriminatory burdensome and costly legal systems have kept them from the legal tools they need to cooperate economically on a national basis, never mind a global one.”

Relationships among people and things in a market economy must somehow be concretized in documents before they can become available around the world. Because documents lower the costs of accessing relevant information and reduce uncertainty about an asset, they help to reveal its true value. Documents and systems greatly speed up the process of making transactions.

People in developing countries lack access to these empowering documents, much less the legal system that gives them their power. That is why they remain mired in poverty. If leaders change the law that so poor people can easily integrate and trade, they can move from poverty to wealth relatively quickly.

                                                             Tentative Program

8:15   Arrival and Registration

8:30   Welcome from representatives of RELIAL, Instituto Friedrich Naumann para a Liberdade  and Instituto Liberdade (5 minutes for each one)

8:45   Presentation of the 2010 International Index of Property Rights in Portuguese under the Hernando de Soto Fellowship program (Property Rights Alliance) - the English printed version will be also distributed.

The International Property Rights Index (IPRI) is an international comparative study that measures the significance of both physical and intellectual property rights and their protection for economic well-being. Hernando De Soto, whose seminal work on property rights led to the conception of the IPRI, said about that the results “continue to point out the relationship between a strong property rights system and a country’s economic well-being, revealing that much still needs to be done to extend property rights to more people, especially the poor.”

9:00   Guest Speaker: Eduardo Marty, Junior Achievement, Argentina

9:20   Q&A and debate

9:30   Guest Speaker: Denis Rosenfield, Brazil

9:50   Q&A and debate

10:00  to 10:30 Coffee break

10:30  Presentation and screening of the TV documentary “The Power of the Poor” from Hernando de Soto. It was produced by Free to Choose Media, funded by the John Templeton Foundation and presented by WTTW National Productions in Chicago. It was aired in October 2009 at PBS stations across United States. The documentary presents a strong, visually arresting case for how the developing world’s underground, “informal” economies can be harnessed to unleash the economic power of the poor to lift themselves – and their countries – out of poverty.

Duration: 60 minutes screening. Due to high costs of translating and including the subtitle, the documentary will be only in English.

11:30  Debate and Conclusion

12:30 Luncheon at Churrascaria na Brasa – private room

FOR REGISTRATION OF THE SEMINAR, PLEASE ENTER IN CONTACT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE WITH Instituto Liberdade - Sra. Luciana Pinto, email: il-rs@il-rs.org.br

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