Review by Choice Review
Eschewing jargon or highly technical vocabulary, economist Schodt demonstrates that in Ecuador ``linkages between economic fluctuations and political stability are particularly well defined.'' Regional rather than national interests have predominated politically for two reasons: its sharply accidental geography separates the country into sierra and coast, and the booms punctuating the nation's monocultural economy in the last hundred years-cacao, bananas, and now petroleum-have benefited mainly one region with only secondary effects on the other. Thus the government's legitimacy hinges more on its ``ability to provide concrete benefits to competing interest groups than {{on its}} adherence to constitutional procedures.'' This capacity is in turn subject to an economy heavily dependent on the world market. As the nation's economy goes, so goes its democracy-all too often into exile. Schodt succeeds in making sense of the complicated, sometimes bizarre politics of a little-studied nation. Even so, a livelier prose with a few anecdotes would have provided a welcome respite from the intense political/economic focus that occasionally forgets that, for all their GNP figures and party squabbles, nations are made up of people. Upper-level undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty.-C.E. Landers, Jersey City State College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
