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...

The author describes a spread-sheet planning model to help determine the government deficit consistent with a policymaker's"vector"of principal macroeconomic objectives (including real GDP growth, inflation, exchange rate, and international reserve accumulation). The model focuses on the...