Erdöl in Ecuador

Abstract

On the base of expanding oil export and favorable international credits Ecuador was able to achieve significant economic growth and a consolidation of it’s nation state during the decade of the 1970s. But the decline of the oil price and the increase of credit costs in the early 1980s led Ecuador, as most of the peripheral states, to the debt crisis. Increasing dependence on the export of natural resources and the subjection under the IMF’s and Worldbank’s rigid dept management have characterized unstable situation of the country since then. This hasn’t changed with the dollarization in 2000 either. An alternative perspective consists in the renunciation from the oil economy, with all it’s devastating ecological, economic and social consequences.