Opening paragraphs.......................

Imagine a country where nobody can identify who owns what, addresses cannot be easily verified, people cannot be made to pay their debts, resources cannot conveniently be turned into money, ownership cannot be divided in 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.  You have just put yourself into the life of a developing country or former communist nation;  more precisely, you have imaged life for 80 percent of its population, which is marked off as sharply from its Westernized elite as black and white South Africans were once separated by apartheid.
     This 80 percent majority is not, as Westerners often imagine, desperately impoverished.  In spite of their obvious poverty, even those who live under the most grossly unequal regimes possess far more than anybody has ever understood.  What they possess, however, is not represented in such a way as to produce additional value.  When you step out of the door of the Nile Hilton, what you are leaving behind is not the high-technology world of fax machines and ice makers, televisions and antibiotics.  The people of Cairo have access to all those things.
     What you are really leaving behind is the world of legally enforceable transactions on property rights.

-Hernando de Soto,  Chapter 2, The Mystery Of Capital:  Why Capitalism Triumphs In The West And Fails Everywhere Else,  Basic Books, 2000