The 'mystification of capital': legal title for the low-income housing market
OUTPUT TYPE: Journal Article
PUBLICATION YEAR: 2008
TITLE AUTHOR(S): U.Pillay
KEYWORDS: HOUSING DELIVERY, POVERTY, PROPERTY RIGHTS, SERVICE INDUSTRIES
Web link: http://www.hsrc.ac.za/en/review/june-2008/mystification-of-capital
Intranet: HSRC Library: shelf number 5367
HANDLE: 20.500.11910/5319
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11910/5319
If you would like to obtain a copy of this Research Output, please contact Hanlie Baudin at researchoutputs@hsrc.ac.za.
Abstract
The crux of De Soto's argument revolves around why nations of the developing world are desperately impoverished, and often burdened by crippling poverty. This, according to him, is largely a function of the deficiencies in their organisation of property rights. This applies to legal institutions as well as their implication and adaptation to factual circumstances. De Soto's position is that the poor have at their disposal all of the material resources they need to secure prosperity. What they lack is a formal, officially registered right of ownership of these assets. The absence of such legal instruments means that the assets of the poor cannot be purchased, exchanged, sold, bequeathed, lent, or transferred in any way other than within the framework of limited networks, often subjugated to parasitic local institutions of power. These assets, therefore, cannot serve as the basis for an efficient and dynamic accumulation of capital. They become, in De Soto's words, 'dead capital'. Thus the informal sector becomes what is usually called undercapitalised and as a result cannot realise its full potential.-
Related Research Outputs:
- Towards slum-free cities: MDG impacts on South Africa's policies, strategies and activities so far
- Facts, fiction or fabrication? Service delivery, 1994-1999
- Facts, fiction and fabrication: service delivery in South Africa: 1994-1999
- Life on the farm: shifting social and moral foundations of the farming community, October
- Pipe dream for the province's poor?
- Living with rats
- Squalor and its cohorts
- Is anyone listening to the poor?
- Meeting needs, building society: is delivery flowing from growth?
- Sanitation: real solutions for the poor?
- Really making a difference: improving participation in delivering sanitation to poor communities
- Land management in Diepkloof: land shortage, participation and contestation
- State control in self-help housing: evidence from South Africa
- Monitoring MDG 1: conceptual and implementation issues
- Evaluation of government's poverty relief programme: final project report
- Housing delivery and strategic decision-making in the Eastern Cape
- Public to private ownership: an analysis of the challenges characterizing formal housing transfer in Diepkloof (Johannesburg)
- Hernando de Soto and the 'mystification of capital': a critical exploration of the difference that legal title makes for the low-income housing market in South Africa
- Assessment of the public policy processes followed in low-cost housing provision since 1994
- A rapid verification study on the informal settlements and backyard shacks' backlog and trends within the Eastern Cape