Hernando de Soto Polar - Praise For Work

Praise For Work

Time magazine chose de Soto as one of the five leading Latin American innovators of the century in its special May 1999 issue Leaders of the New Millennium, and included him among the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004. De Soto was also listed as one of the 15 innovators "who will reinvent your future" according to Forbes magazine's 85th anniversary edition. In January 2000, Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit, the German development magazine, described de Soto as one of the most important development theoreticians. In October 2005, over 20,000 readers of Prospect magazine of the UK and Foreign Policy magazine of the U.S. ranked him as number 13 on the magazines’ joint survey of the world's Top 100 Public Intellectuals Poll.

U.S. presidents from both major parties have praised de Soto's work. Bill Clinton, for example, called him "The world's greatest living economist", George H. W. Bush declared that "De Soto's prescription offers a clear and promising alternative to economic stagnation…" Bush's predecessor, Ronald Reagan said, "De Soto and his colleagues have examined the only ladder for upward mobility. The free market is the other path to development and the one true path. It is the people's path… it leads somewhere. It works." His work has also received praise from two United Nations Secretaries-General Kofi Annan—"Hernando de Soto is absolutely right, that we need to rethink how we capture economic growth and development"—and Javier Pérez de Cuéllar—"A crucial contribution. A new proposal for change that is valid for the whole world."