The ILD’s remedy is to help developing countries reform institutions to legally empower their poor majorities with the essential tools of prosperity: property rights, forms to organize businesses and mechanisms to expand their markets.

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Armed with the ILD’s three decades of experience, our researchers walk the streets of an extralegal economy detecting amidst the appearances of “anarchy” and “illegality” the common practices and norms that allow people to make transactions and protect their assets – much like the paleontologist who can detect a dinosaur fossil where the rest of us see just another pile of rocks.

With those new economic facts in hand, ILD recommends reforms that will merge these two parallel economies under a single rule of law. There are hundreds of “consulting” companies trying to help countries improve their business environments through titling, mapping or top-down solutions;only the ILD knows how to tailor bottom-up reforms that systematically bring extralegal assets into the economic mainstream – to boost growth and counter poverty, social unrest, populist attacks against “globalization,” and even terrorism.