Since 2008, De Soto has been refining his thesis about the importance of property rights to development in response to his organization’s findings that a number of new global threats have "property rights distortions" at their root. In essays, that appeared from early 2009 into 2012 in media outlets in the U.S. and Europe, De Soto argued that the reason why the U.S. and European economies were mired in recession was the result of a "knowledge crisis" not a financial one.[20][21][22][23][24]
"Capitalism lives in two worlds," De Soto wrote in the Financial Times in January 2012. "There is the visible one of palm trees and Panamanian ships, but it is the other – made up of the property information cocooned in laws and records – that allows us to organize and understand fragments of reality and join them creatively."[25] De Soto argued that the knowledge in those public memory systems, which "helped Capitalism triumph," was distorted over the past 15 years or so. "Until this knowledge system is repaired," he wrote, "neither US nor European capitalism will recover." [26]
In another series of articles that appeared in US and Europe in 2011, De Soto used the findings of ILD field research in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya to make his case for "the economic roots of the Arab Spring."[27][28][29] The ongoing Arab revolutions, he argued, were "economic revolutions" driven mainly by the frustrations of 200 million ordinary Arabs who depended on the informal economy for their livelihoods.[28][29] He pointed to the ILD’s earlier 2004 findings in Egypt, which revealed the nation’s largest employer with 92% of the property in the informal economy – assets worth almost $247 billion.[27][30] Also, as proof of the extent of desperation among MENA’s entrepreneurs, he elaborated ILD’s exclusive research on Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose public self-immolation in protest of the expropriation of his goods and scale literally sparked the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, which spread unrest through the Arab world.[31][32][33]
In 2014-2015, De Soto and his team have been attempting to guide the political process in Peru,as Presidential elections are due to take place in 2016, by finding solutions to the ongoing national mining crisis. De Soto has been a strong advocate for the formalisation of the informal miners that are scattered throughout Peru.[34][35] Since 2014, several large national investment projects, including Las Bambas, and Tia Maria have been disrupted by violent protests by informal miners against government regulation and formal extractive industries.[36] In July 2015, the ILD discovered that former Shining Path militants who have taken up the ecological cause were paralyzing some $70 billion in mining investment in Peru.[37]
Furthermore, recorded video debates between the former extremists and De Soto were published on ILD’s YouTube channel and revealed that the Shining Path militants agree that property rights could be an important part of the solution to social conflicts in Peru.[38] De Soto’s stated goal is to determine the roots of informal hostility against multinationals and identify what is needed to build a national social contract on extractive industries that could harmonize their property interests with those of multinationals as opposed to creating conflict.[37]