Ecuador’s Ambassador Misses the Point: Dollarization

Ecuador’s ambassador to the U.S., Francisco Borja Cevallos, wrote a letter, “Ecuador’s Progress,” which was published in the New York Times on August 8th. Ambassador Borja reviews a number of Ecuador’s recent economic accomplishments. Fine. After all, by Latin American standards, Ecuador has performed well. Indeed, my Misery Index rankings for the region in 2014 show that only Panama, Mexico, and El Salvador performed better than Ecuador did.

What Ambassador Borja failed to mention is the true source of Ecuador’s relative success: dollarization. Yes, Ecuador is dollarized. Ecuador represented a prime example of a country that was incapable of imposing the rule of law and safeguarding the value of its currency, the sucre. The Ecuadorian sucre traded at 6,825 per dollar at the end of 1998, and by the end of 1999 the sucre-dollar rate was 20,243. During the first week of January 2000, the sucre rate soared to 28,000 per dollar.

With the sucre in shambles, President Jamil Mahuad announced, on January 9, 2000, that Ecuador would abandon the sucre and officially dollarize the economy. Telephone calls from both President Bill Clinton and U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers encouraged Mahuad to dollarize. The positive confidence shock was immediate. On January 11th — even before a dollarization law had been enacted—the central bank lowered the rediscount rate from 200 percent a year to 20 percent. On February 29th, the Ecuadorian Congress passed the so-called Ley Trolebus, which contained dollarization provisions. It became law on March 13th, and after a transition period in which the dollar replaced the sucre, Ecuador became the world’s most populous dollarized country. And dollarization remains, to this day, highly popular; most Ecuadorians — 85 percent — still give dollarization a thumbs up. What Ecuadorians fear is that President Rafael Correa, who has opposed dollarization in the past, might just abandon the greenback, which is Ecuador’s anchor of stability.