“We’re looking a lot more like Venezuela,” according to former minister

Minister Mauricio Pozo said in an interview with Ecuavisa that “we are looking a lot more like Venezuela than other neighboring countries or Chile,” this in reference to the similarity of the Ecuadorian economic crisis after the collapse of oil prices.

“Living with a credit card without responsabilty, and accumulating debt, it seems outrageous. The credit card has to be paid at some point.”

According to Pozo, “what the government has made to finance the hole that appeared in December last year, which has been nothing different from what has been done in the previous period, ie borrow more, hiring obligations under conditions absolutely onerous, transferring the problem to the future, and now, in January we are in a very difficult situation because the economic program is not present.”

For the former minister, an economic program is not receiving money from abroad, borrowing, receiving taxes revenues and spending it all. An economic program -he said- is having objectives, goals, instruments, making reforms, seeking international agreements, signing agreements with creditors under adequate conditions .. “and not having a country under economic recession the previous year, under economic recession in 2016 and extremely probably in 2017 because the government that assumes that, -whatecer it is- is going to need to make decisions, and these will cost.”