[lbo-talk] Ecuador Approves Changes to Constitution

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 4/17/07, Sean Andrews <cultstud76 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/16/07, Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I love good news like this, _even_ from Simon Romero, especially news
> > that includes Iran with Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador.  :->  It
> > almost compensates for the alarming development in Turkey that I
> > learned about from Sabri Oncu. -- Yoshie
>
> Yes.  But I also think that Correa is a ball of contradictions.  What
> are other people's takes on him.  He is obviously riding Chavez's
> Bolivarian wave, but he is also a PhD economist from Chicago
> (Urbana-Champaign), which hasn't always ended up making things better.
>  However, his thesis is an explicit critique of the Washington
> Consensus, even if it uses economics as the method of critique.  Here
> is the abstract:
>
> <BLOCKQUOTE>
> Since the mid-1980s, most Latin American countries began an
> accelerated process of structural reforms in the line of the so-called
> "Washington Consensus". The first chapter of the dissertation tests
> the robustness of former evidence showing a positive correlation
> between the reforms and the Latin-American economic growth or the
> respective sources of growth. The results are notable. No reform is
> robustly correlated with the expected sign with growth, investment, or
> productivity growth, and there is strong econometric evidence that
> some reforms, and particularly labor deregulation, are harming
> productivity growth.
<snip>
> I've heard people accusing him of opportunism, but it seems like he
> basically revolted from the previous administration based on World
> Bank rangling and got a good amount of popular support for it and then
> decided to try to use that credibility to make some changes.  In any
> case, I am interested in watching this very carefully as I'm going
> down for a visit over the summer.  So if anyone has good sources on
> him or the changes going on in Ecuador, please pass them along.

It seems to me that Rafael Correa has maintained his criticism of the
Washington Consensus that he worked out in his dissertation: Rafael
Correa, "Dolarización y políticas alternativas. ECUADOR: De Absurdas
Dolarizaciones a Uniones Monetarias,"
<http://www.defensahumanidad.cu/artic.php?item=1374>; 28 de Noviembre
2006, "El Sofisma del Libre Comercio," 30 de Noviembre 2006,
<http://www.defensahumanidad.cu/artic.php?item=1375>; Rafael Correa,
"Vulnerabilidad e Inestabilidad de las Economías Latinoamericanas," 2
de Diciembre 2006,
<http://www.defensahumanidad.cu/artic.php?item=1376>.  Now he has an
opportunity to put his ideas into action, and it looks like he at
least plans to do so: see his "Plan de Gobierno Alianza País
2007-2011":
<http://www.rafaelcorrea.com/plandegobierno.php>.  What might his
government be like if he is successful?  Picture a government run by
Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen.  That's not an Ecuadorian Chavez
government, but one that is more humane as well as intelligent than
the Lula government.

But the government is not just Correa.  What are the ideas of others
in the government?  How well are people organized to push for change
in their interest?  What are the reactions of domestic and
international capitalists?  All these questions have to be studied,
and I'd love to know what you will find out once you get there.
-- 
Yoshie