Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2014-03-13-Speech-4-094-000"
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"en.20140313.11.4-094-000"2
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"Madam President, we are discussing a very important report this morning, and I would like to start by briefly sharing with you a story. Imagine a completely underdeveloped nation with nothing in it, peopled by millions of uneducated refugees with no assets, money or available donor funds, without bank accounts, law courts, hospitals or schools – absolutely nothing. A nation peopled by people who are poorly educated. And within a span of 120[nbsp ]years, that nation becomes and transforms itself into the richest, most technologically-advanced country in the world. How did a country without World Bank, IMF or EU aid turn itself from an empty land into the richest country in the world? That is the story of development, and we have forgotten it.
How did they do it? They understood how to form capital. The legal property system transformed natural assets – land, houses, small businesses – into capital. The asset potential can be unlocked, forming investments, shareholdings, equity, debentures, mortgages, insurance. This understanding made what we now call the United States of America the richest country in the world. But around the world where we try and help poor developing countries, when we examine their structures, they do not have any of these capabilities that can turn assets into securitisable capital, and when we look at the millions and millions of businesses that are lining the streets of developing countries as we go from the airport to the capital city, or hundreds of thousands of slums, all those are unregistered, non-legal and not transferable, not asset-realisable, and I am very glad that the European Commissioner for Budgets is sitting here listening to this, because he will understand this more than anybody in the Commission. Today 1.2 billion people occupy property which they do not hold formal rights to, or live without permanent homes. Some 90[nbsp ]% of the land in Africa alone is unregistered.
The total value of the extra-legal unregistered wealth in developing countries amounts to over USD[nbsp ]10 trillion: 93 times larger than the total of all the foreign aid to developing countries that we have given over the past 30[nbsp ]years. This amount is larger than the capital of the New York Stock Exchange, the London Stock Exchange, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and there it is, lying unregistered and unusable – over USD[nbsp ]10 trillion.
What I am asking now is for us to be able to prepare a way of turning those unregistered assets into registerable assets so that those people themselves can realise the potential of the value of the land and the businesses that they have. In order to do that, we have to assist in a very small way in helping them to register land, to get surveyors and people with legal qualifications to understand how to demark, distribute, value and register the land, and how to register businesses. For example, it takes more than 300[nbsp ]days to register a business in Peru. It takes over 180[nbsp ]days to open a bank account in Burkina Faso. These are the impediments that have been created in turning assets into wealth. The developing countries, particularly the countries of Africa, are sitting on enormous wealth, and yet it is unrecognisable and untappable. This report addresses that problem and asks us to change it so that these people will have poverty eliminated by the creation of wealth."@en1
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