Hallo, review dari koran the times hari ini membahas satu buku menarik tentang ekonomi terselubung di daerah-daerah kumuh di kota-kota besar dunia. Sangat menarik untuk yang biasa bergelut di bidang ekonomi rakyat kecil, atau mungkin saya nya yang ketinggalan jaman ya, baru sadar berapa besar potensi penduduk daerah-daerah kumuh :-) bye Money from nothing THE MYSTERY OF CAPITAL By Hernando de Soto Bantam, �15 ISBN 0 593 04664 1 In 1995 I visited Lima's pueblos j�venes, the shanty towns crouched on every inch of the dusty hillsides around Peru's capital city. Escape to a more comfortable life seemed impossible, but in this remarkable book Hernando de Soto, chief advisor to Alberto Fujimori, Peru's charismatic but complex President, performs a breathtaking alchemy. He turns the tumbledown shacks and rivulets of sewage that are typical of the world's shanty towns into, as he memorably puts it, "acres of diamonds". He argues that the poor migrants who have converged on cities such as Lima and Port-au-Prince and Manila are not ragged no-hopers who deserve our pity but are now the world's most dynamic entrepreneurs. Unnoticed by the West, they have amassed vast savings; but this wealth is held "extra-legally", outside the law, including land registry and property ownership law. Having examined "block by block and farm by farm in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America", Sr de Soto and his team of researchers estimate that the total value of real estate alone held by the poor is $9.3 trillion. This is more than twice the total US money supply and nearly as much as the total value of all the companies listed on the 20 top world stock exchanges. This claim seems too good to be true until one hits upon two arresting nuggets of information. In 1995, the Brazilian construction industry reported a mere 0.1 per cent growth; yet cement sales in the first six months of 1996 soared by nearly 20 per cent. The discrepancy is because most construction never makes it into the records. The other killer fact is that in Lima the value of legal, titled property in its most fashionable districts climbs to as high as $1,000 a square metre. In Gamarra, an area where much black economy manufacturing is done, the value is as much as $3,000. So, the poor really are climbing the economic ladder but, because prosperous elites refuse to recognise their wealth legally, it cannot be used as collateral for loans or mortgages. This is a crushing limitation when one considers that the single largest source of funds for new businesses in America is a mortgage on an entrepreneur's house. "They have," de Soto writes, "trillions of dollars in dead capital, but it is as if these were isolated ponds whose waters disappear into a sterile strip of sand, instead of forming a mighty mass of water that can be captured in one unified property system and given the form required to produce capital." To prove just how difficult it it is to "crash through the bell jars of legal privilege", Sr de Soto's team set up a small garment workshop on the outskirts of Lima and then embarked on making the business legal. The business was registered after 289 days at a cost of $1,231, 31 times the monthly minimum wage. To obtain legal authorisation to build a house on state-owned land took six years and 11 months, requiring 207 administrative steps in 52 government offices. And this is by no means the worst example: in Haiti, it takes an average of 19 years to gain lawful land. Land and property ownership has long been identified as a prerequisite for economic development, but Sr de Soto has given vivid flesh to that theory. With the problem identified, the solution - creating proper national legal systems as in the West - is a matter of political will. In a book which is fastidious in its search for the facts but passionate in spirit and language, Sr de Soto gives us no less than the blueprint for a new industrial revolution that will mobilise the entrepreneurial vigour and hidden wealth of the poor and tear up the conventional wisdoms of the development debate in the process. ************************************************************** Danial Irfachsyad [EMAIL PROTECTED] Department of Chemistry University of Southampton ************************************************************** --------------------------------------------------------------------- Mulai langganan: kirim e-mail ke [EMAIL PROTECTED] Stop langganan: kirim e-mail ke [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archive ada di http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
