"Five years ago, Hernando de Soto and his research team closed their books and opened their eyes. They went into the streets of developing and former communist nations to learn what real people are achieving inside and outside the underground economy. Their findings are dramatic. The data they have collected demonstrate that the world's poor have accumulated all the assets needed for successful capitalism." "Why then are these countries so underdeveloped? Why can't they turn these assets into liquid capital - the kind of capital that generates new wealth? De Soto reminds us that the present global crisis is the same kind of crisis that the advanced nations suffered during the Industrial Revolution, when they themselves were Third World countries teeming with black markets, pervasive mafias, widespread poverty and flagrant disregard of the law. The Western nations, he argues, created the key conversion process 150 years ago, and their Economies began to soar into wealth without their ever realizing what they had done. De Soto explains how this unwitting process, hidden deep in thousands of pieces of property law throughout the West, came to be, how it works, and how today it can be deliberately set up in developing and former communist nations."--BOOK JACKET.