For starters, Dr Singh has given members of his cabinet two books from Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto Polar, whom the government will turn to for advice on how to handle its massive urban poverty.

Known as the ‘poor man’s capitalist’ for his insistence that market economies must work to include their poorest citizens socially, legally and economically, de Soto is a legend in academia for his work on informal economies and how to bring impoverished populations into the mainstream.

But he’s not merely an ivory-tower academic.

He is the president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, located in Lima, Peru. In 2004, Time magazine chose him as one of 100 most influential people in the world. And diplomats and policy makers around world seek him out for advice.

De Soto was born in 1941 in Peru, but following a military coup his family soon fled the country for Europe, where he was educated in Switzerland [ Images ], including at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.

Throughout a glittering career, de Soto has gradually shifted away from corporate work and towards his passion: Designing and implementing capital formation programmes and focussing on building transparent business and property laws in underdeveloped parts of the world.

In his capacity as head of the ILD, over two dozen heads of state have invited him to carry out capital formation programmes in their countries.

Describing his methods in a recent ILD brochure, de Soto says, “What we do is help governments build a system of public memory that legally identifies all their people, their assets, their business records and their transactions in such a way that they can unleash their economic potential. No economy can develop and prosper without the benefits that clearly registered public documents bestow.”

Much of de Soto’s theory is built on the idea that ‘assets outside the law’, what he calls dead capital, could be used to fuel growth if only they were brought into the legal mainstream.

de Soto’s “The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else” is an outstanding read. It emphasizes giving property rights to Bottom-of-the-Pyramind residents of shanty towns – so they can use newly acuired clean property titles to mortgage their assets, and borrow for e.g. investing in education and starting small businesses.

Brazil, Colombia and Peru will likely see most merger and acquisitions activity in Latin America in the second half of the year, according to a Latin Business Chronicle roundtable of M&A experts. However, Mexico and Chile will also garner their share, while Argentina – a leading M&A market in the 1990’s — will remain the odd man out, they point out.

Mergers and acquisitions in Latin America grew by 171 percent in the second quarter to $112.8 billion, the second-highest growth worldwide after India, according to Dealogic data quoted by Dow Jones. That’s more than the $106.4 billion announced last year, when those deals fell 27 percent, according to Thomson Reuters.

Indian Oil Minister Murli Deora traveled to Nigeria, Angola, Uganda, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela this year, leading a record number of delegations to gain oil for the world’s third-fastest-growing major economy.

The flurry of visits is part of a new drive to find oil for India’s 1.2 billion people after losing out to China in at least $12.5 billion of contracts in the past year. India proposed a sovereign wealth fund to bid for reserves, told state-controlled Oil & Natural Gas Corp. and Oil India Ltd. to make a major acquisition each this year, and raised the amount they can spend without government approval to 50 billion rupees ($1.1 billion).

“There is a new push,” said N.M. Borah, chairman of state-owned exploration company Oil India. “Going abroad is part of the government’s policy — diplomatic support is very, very crucial as we search for assets overseas.”

India’s energy use may more than double by 2030 to the equivalent of 833 million metric tons of oil from 2007, while China’s demand may rise 87 percent to 2.4 billion tons, the Paris-based International Energy Agency said.

India faces an uneven contest to close the gap with China, which is dipping into $2.4 trillion of foreign currency reserves to buy stakes in oil and natural gas fields from Iraq to Uganda, compared with India’s $250 billion in foreign exchange reserves. State-run Chinese companies spent a record $32 billion last year acquiring energy and resources assets overseas versus India’s single $2.1 billion investment by ONGC. China’s June 19 decision to allow the yuan to appreciate will further strengthen the hand of Chinese companies buying overseas.

India’s oil import bill climbed six-fold in the past decade to $85.47 billion for the year ended March, equivalent to about 7 percent of gross domestic product.

China’s political economy, freed from democratic and constraints, allows for long-term strategic bets in the national interest. All the talk of India-Africa historic ties is meaningless because ultimately money talks – there are more and larger kickbacks to be had for politicians and officials in oil-producing at the receiving end of Chinese largesse.

The answer to the last questions is no. Consequently, over the next 2 decades, a wave of sovereign defaults will occur in the West, starting in Europe – in the PIIGS group of countries and/or Eastern Europe, and finally ending in the U.S. Good video ‘Money as Debt‘ about monetary systems instituted by banking.

Secular changes in demand occurred previously in the industrialisation of the US at the turn of the twentieth century, during the reconstruction of Europe after World War II and during the industrialisation of Japan in the 1960s and 1970s, he states.

“The difference with the current secular change is its sheer scale. We are dealing with the urbanisation and industrialisation of over one-third of the world’s population in China, but also in India, Brazil and other developing countries, especially in South-East Asia. In fact, over 400-million people are expected to move to urban centres over the next ten years. And, as countries industrialise, the intensity with which they use metals and energy increases,” Davis explains.

The ‘China effect’ ignited demand for commodities and boosted commodity markets a few years later. The impact of this effect could lead to a period of higher average commodity prices.

As a result of the lack of cap- acity, the mining industry could not provide new supply in response to the burgeoning demand from China, the impli- cations of which continue to reverberate today, he adds.

Increased demand from developing markets is depleting mines, while exploration for new significant mines has not been as successful in the last decade as in the one before.