Property rights and markets are utterly essential for prosperity, but these must emerge from the bottom up

Paths to Property from Cafe Hayek by Don Boudreaux

Karol and her Mercatus Center colleague Paul Dragos Aligica have just had their important new monograph -- Paths to Property -- published by the prestigious Institute of Economic Affairs. (And my colleague Pete Boettke supplies the Foreword.)

Karol and Paul challenge the conventional wisdom (made popular today by certain Irish rock stars) that Africa's poverty can be solved with more foreign aid. But nor will prosperity emerge from simple cookie-cutter "market solutions." Property rights and markets are utterly essential for prosperity, but these must emerge from the bottom up. Top-down imposition tends to produce sorry results. Empirical examples abound, drawn from Karol's extensive fieldwork in sub-Saharan Africa.