Nontraditional or New Traditional Exports: Ecuador’s Flower Boom

Abstract

This article seeks to explore the sources of the boom in flower exports from Ecuador in the last fifteen years. Rising from almost nothing in the late 1980s, fresh cut flowers now account for 8 percent of the country’s nonpetroleum export earnings. The research attempts to establish whether trade liberalization and macroeconomic reforms played a decisive role in stimulating the export boom or whether changes in the global flower market created Ecuador’s comparative advantage in flower exports independent of the policy regime. The article concludes that both sets of forces played an important role.