Where is this guy getting his figures from? Leave aside his long intro, about historical debts. Yes, the place was exploited but those debts are not still extant.
Ecuador paid 57% of its
national income in the jubilee year of 2000 for the interest on its
debt, and this year will have to borrow money in order to meet premium
debt payments. The foreign debt is an immoral imposition, an illegal
burden, a death sentence on future development and prosperity.
What is the talking about? Here’s the figures for Ecuador.
GDP: purchasing power parity – $49.51 billion (2004 est.)
Debt – external:$16.81 billion (2004 est.)
I’m sorry, but if external debt is 32% of GDP (quite a low number by the way, much lower than, say, Italy, and way way below the bankrupt states of Africa) how in hell did they pay 57% of GDP in debt repayment? Yes, yes, I know that these are 2004 figures and he’s using 2000 figures but there is no way that they can be that far out of whack.
There is one way out of this conundrum, which is that when he says "national income" he means export income. In which case he is simply ignorant, for they are not the same thing at all.
Public debt (not all of which is foreign) is only 50% of GDP, again a low number (Japan’s is over 100%) and they’ve got export earnings of $7 billion a year from oil. Yes, it’s a poor country but it isn’t their foreign debt that’s the problem, all of those numbers look entirely reasonable, entirely capable of being handled. Whatever the problem they have it just ain’t the foreign debt.
An excell spreadsheet of the OECD’s information on Ecuador is Download ecuador.xls
. Very difficult to see where his claims are coming from.
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