Ecuador’s Buen Vivir A Developmental State in the Andes?

Abstract

After the Second World War, Japan and its economy were crippled. The industrial power it once had was reduced to rubble, with millions of people left to live in precarious conditions. However, in just a matter of years, the Japanese economy began to re-emerge; local companies became multi-national corporations, and hundreds of high-quality ‘Made in Japan’ products began flocking Western markets. To the surprise of Western economists, researchers, and politicians alike, Japan began rivaling mature economies without implementing either pure Anglo-American laissez-faire or Soviet-style central planning. This was the work of the “developmental state”’, a set of regulatory economic policies oriented towards developing and protecting local industry. Other countries such as South Korea successfully implemented similar industrial policies during the Cold War. But is the “‘developmental state”’ success story an Asia-only phenomenon? In Latin America, former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa envisioned a similar plan to develop and modernize the country according to his own, post-neoliberal and environmentally-centered concept of development. The purpose of this article is to compare Ecuador’s national development plans from 2007 until 2017 and the policy goals of the Japanese and Korean developmental states.