The Ecuadorian Oil Era

By focusing on a half-century of recent Latin American economic history, this book presents a multidisciplinary approach to examining the relentless pursuit of development in the Global South and aims to revitalise the academic debate on whether having abundant natural resources is a blessing or a curse. Its pioneering diachronic comparative approach of analysing two Ecuadorian oil booms, those in 1972–1980 and 2003–2014, reveals processes of continuity and change in the capacity of this peripheral state to intervene in its national development process and the consequences of this on its social formation, framed by the contemporary trends of global capitalism and the irruption of environmental thinking into development policymaking.