In January 2000 Ecuador announced that it would dollarize fully, in response to an unprecedented crisis encompassing recession, widespread bank failures, and incipient hyperinflation. The crisis had intensified since early 1998, when a combination of external and climatic shocks set it off. The...

Early in 2000, Ecuador, confronted with a serious economic crisis, adopted the US dollar as its national currency, This book examines the conditions that led to this action, describing the repeated cycles of crisis and failed stabilization that fatally undermined confidence in the Ecuadorian...

Over the 1980s and 1990s, GDP growth had stagnated because of oil export price volatility and natural disasters, the sacrifice of capital formation to heavy external public debt service, and incomplete and uneven structural reform. The exchange rate depreciation that proved continually necessary...