Secure property rights are essential for the functioning of market economies and thus for the creation of prosperity. This applies to the developed industrial countries as well as for the developing countries, where there is disregard of individual property rights meaning many people are unable to escape poverty.

Our friend and IUF Senior Fellow, Joel Bucher, died of a heart attack on November 14, 2009 in his apartment in Odessa, Ukraine. Joel was based in IUF's Berlin office until 2007, and then moved to Odessa in search of entrepreneurial opportunities.

The Fourth International Conference on Climate Change will call attention to the growing divide between what science has to say about the causes, scale, and consequences of climate change, on the one hand, and what politicians and the media say on the other hand.

The Institute for Free Enterprise in collaboration with Open Europe published a new poll which shows that 77% of Germans want to be given a say on the Lisbon Treaty in a national referendum.

Coauthored and edited by S. Fred Singer, Ph.D., and Craig Idso, Ph.D., the report is a comprehensive rebuttal of the Working Group I contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report (2007) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Essay for the blog contest sponsored by Free to Choose Media, promoting Hernando DeSoto's new documentary "The Power of the Poor". See a video preview of the documentary at this link.

 

Essay Question: "What institutions can enable the world's poor to realize their power and achieve prosperity?"

 

Read the essay at the link below...