[21][better source needed] The ILD has received praise from other people including Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, World Bank President James Wolfensohn, and former UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar.

[23][27] De Soto returned to Peru on the behalf of gold placer investors at the age of 38 in 1979 at a time when neoliberal policy was moving from the fringes of economic theory to mainstream practice.

[28] In 1984, de Soto received further assistance from the United States president Ronald Reagan's administration, with the National Endowment for Democracy's Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) providing ILD with funding and education for advertising campaigns.

[28] Between 1988 and 1995, de Soto and the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD) were mainly responsible for some four hundred initiatives, laws, and regulations that led to significant changes in Peru's economic system.

[33][34] University of Chicago political scientist Susan C. Stokes believes that de Soto's influence helped change the policies of Fujimori from a Keynesian to a neoliberal approach.

[23] The Cato Institute and The Economist magazine have argued that de Soto's policy prescriptions brought him into conflict with and eventually helped to undermine the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) guerrilla movement.

By granting titles to small coca farmers in the two main coca-growing areas, they argued that the Shining Path was deprived of safe havens, recruits and money, and the leadership was forced to cities where they were arrested.

[28] De Soto resigned from his post as the "Personal Representative of the President" in January 1992, two months prior to the 1992 Peruvian coup d'état, and condemned Fujimori's motivations being influenced by Director of the National Intelligence Service Vladimiro Montesinos, hinting at signs of corruption.

Boloña resigned from his ministerial post, and de Soto lastly travelled to the 1992 Organization of American States summit in the Bahamas with Fujimori and pressured him to accept democratic elections to prevent another macroeconomic crisis.

[16] English economist John Williamson, who coined the term "Washington Consensus", partly credited de Soto for the prescriptions, saying his work was "the outcome of the worldwide intellectual trends to which Latin America provided".

[16] For United States presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, according to Kate Geohegan of Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, "de Soto's ideas offered a compelling new framework for explaining the problem of economic underdevelopment that seemed to affirm the wisdom of neoliberal policies like adjustment lending".

The consensus resulted with a shrinking middle class in Latin America that prompted dissatisfaction of neoliberalism, a turn to the political left and populist leaders by the late-1990s; in Bolivia, support for Evo Morales was established.

[68] Unreported, unrecorded economic activity results in that many small entrepreneurs lack legal ownership of their property, making it difficult for them to obtain credit, sell the business, or expand.

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.

"[80] 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.

[81][84] 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.

In 2014–2015, de Soto and a small team working out of his house began to attempt to guide the political process in Peru, as presidential elections were due to take place in 2016, by finding solutions to the ongoing national mining crisis.

[88][89] 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.

[91] 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.

[91] In October 2014, de Soto published an article in The Wall Street Journal, "The Capitalist Cure for Terrorism", that stated an aggressive agenda for economic empowerment was needed in the Middle East in order to defeat terrorist groups like ISIL.

[100] De Soto argued that Piketty's statistics ignore the ninety percent of the world population that lives in developing countries and former Soviet states, whose inhabitants produce and hold their capital in the informal sector.

[104][105] A week later, de Soto published a second article in Fortune Magazine addressing the Pope's and US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s public spat over building a wall on the Mexican-USA border.

[107][108] In May 2015, de Soto attended the 1st Annual Block Chain Summit hosted by British billionaire Richard Branson at his private Caribbean residence, Necker Island.

Advocates of blockchain technology argue that it is well-suited to acting as a public ledger to help achieve de Soto's objective of formalising the informally held property rights of groups like the indigenous peoples of Peru.

"[137][138] The argument for private and often individualist property regime comes under the question of societal legitimacy, may not be justified even if de Soto eyes bringing a unified system in a state or unification with the global economy.

A study commissioned by DFID, an agency of the U.K. government, further summarized many of the complications arising from implementing de Soto's policy recommendations when insufficient attention is paid to the local social context.

In the World Development journal, a 1990 article by R. G. Rossini and J. J. Thomas of the London School of Economics questioned the statistical basis of de Soto's claims about the size of the informal economy in his first book The Other Path.

[146] On January 31, 2012, de Soto and his publisher were fined by the Peruvian intellectual property rights organization INDECOPI for excluding the names of co-authors Enrique Ghersi and Mario Ghibellini in newer editions of his 1986 book The Other Path.

[147][148][149][150] An article by Madeleine Bunting for The Guardian (UK) claimed that de Soto's suggestions would in some circumstances cause more harm than benefit and referred to The Mystery of Capital as "an elaborate smokescreen" used to obscure the issue of the power of the globalized elite.

[152] Time magazine chose De Soto as one of the five leading Latin American innovators of the century in its special May 1999 issue "Leaders of the New Millennium", and included him among the 100 most influential people in the world in 2004.