Jorge A. Hidrobo - Power and Industrialization in Ecuador

Jorge A. Hidrobo

First published 1992 by Westview Press, Inc.

Published 2019 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hidrobo Estrada, Jorge.
[Industriales, estado, industrializacin en el Ecuador. English]
Power and industrialization in Ecuador / by Jorge A. Hidrobo.
p. cm.
Translation of: Industriales, estado, industrializacin en el
Ecuador.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8133-8398-6
1. Industry and stateEcuador. 2. EcuadorIndustries.
3. EcuadorEconomic policy. 4. EcuadorEconomic conditions1972
I. Title.
HD3616.E23H5313 1992
338.9866dc20 91-38382
CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-28404-6 (hbk)

Jorge A. Hidrobo's fine study of industrial policy in Ecuador is interesting on several counts. For one thing, it goes behind the scenes in a small but complex country to examine how policy has been made under conditions of both increasing and decreasing resource availability. It does so, moreover, in a setting in which the policy process is relatively transparent on account of the number of actors and interests involved and the comparative recency with which the country embarked on serious industrial promotion. The contrasts between Ecuadorian experience and that of the larger Latin American countries, which began to industrialize rather earlier, is instructive, particularly inasmuch as Ecuadorian development authorities voiced the hope, at the outset of the oil boom's accelerated growth, that they might avoid the policy mistakes made during the previous waves of manufacturing expansion elsewhere in the region.

Dr. Hidrobo's study is useful for other reasons, too, for it is unmistakably grounded in the general style of social science analysis favored in Latin America. He reflects, in other words, a distinctive Latin American sensibility in his way of looking at social phenomena. This is not to deny that the study is also deeply informed by the methodology of "political economy" approaches long familiar to scholars in the United States. Neither is it to assert that Dr. Hidrobo's methods are at all identical to the structuralist and Marxian perspectives that once enjoyed such a vogue to the south. With the pretentious but analytically thin "dependency" school of thought it has nothing in common. His path into the fresh data he has turned up by means of surveys is far more firmly anchored to empirical methods of inquiry than are most of the foregoing modes of analysis, aside from the structuralist school in economics, with which this work has close affinity. But in its very theoretical subtlety and eclecticism, Dr. Hidrobo's research constitutes an extremely good example of how the best of the younger Latin American social scientists have retained a certain "holistic" frame of reference while incorporating the insights and understandings yielded by research strategies commonly utilized in the United States today.

As a marker in the development of Latin American social inquiry, therefore, the present work joins a gratifyingly growing number of others on which we can rely for more nuanced and insightful perspectives than could be harvested only a few years ago. Oddly, the crudity once characteristic of some Latin American social science thinking is more apt, today, to show up among that band of North American "social scientists" who self-consciously strive to emulate what they regard as a Latin American perspectivethe kind of rustic antiethnocentrism that, in other forms, has gringos running about garbed in serapes and huaraches.

Besides serving as a study of policymaking, largely in the executive branch, the work at hand also contributes to the not inconsequential literature on Latin American elites and the middle classes. Not all of the subjects of Dr. Hidrobo's research are members of the elite stratum in Ecuadorian social structure, but some of them are, and the rest could easily be consigned to the so-called middle sectors. A good while back it became evident, from applications of modern methods of social inquiry to Latin American realities, that the once-popular clichewhich depicted Latin America as a two-class society dominated by an oligarchy of landowners and military leaders (with prelates sometimes tossed in for good measure)no longer had any validity as a descriptor of the larger countries, if indeed it ever had. Dr. Hidrobo, in company with other perceptive observers, shows us that even in societies that are more "traditional" and economies that are less developed, the situation of the upper and middle strata of society is far more complicated than the shopworn formula of yore would have us believe. For that matter, there is also little in the experience Dr. Hidrobo surveys that looks like the Parsonian pattern variables that students of modernization once expected to find as societies grew more urban and industrial (in a presumably linear fashion). In this respect, this study could properly be termed postmodern in its treatment of the recent economic history of Ecuador.