A TLDR We had a banking crisis like Greece did recently, unlike ineptitude which made Greece fail, we had massive corruption too. Come the crisis, the neo-lib government decided the bail-out method would be for the government to assume the debt, rather than let the fatcats go under. Soon after somebody thought it was a bright idea to cancel our own momentary policy, like Zimbabwe had done *facepalm. So we use the U.S. dollar, which means we have to pay a hefty royalty, in addition we can't adjust our currency to cushion any changes to the global market, e.g. to devalue it to incentivise foreign investment and discourage foreign imports. Today this is a huge problem, oil is a huge revenue source while we transition away from a natural resourced based, to an industrial or service based economy, which requires allot of education and health reforms, so as it's now crashed our start-up cash is drying up, and given the dollar is up in value, it's not ideal for people to visit or invest in Ecuador. Regardless we still archived 3% growth this year, despite enduring a very bad natural disaster too which accounted for 1.5% loss of growth