As dire and urgent need consider President of the Republic, Guillermo Lasso, attracting investment and creating wealth, which will generate employment in the country. This is one of the main arguments that the president presents before the Constitutional Court in an official letter dated May 31, in order to justify the urgency of the second decree of the law for Attracting and promoting investment for productive development.

The court asked the executive to explain why it considers that both the first regulation (taxes) and the second (free zones) have the nature of economic urgency. In both cases, the government responded with letters that were published on the Court’s website.

In the case of attracting and encouraging investment, the Government emphasizes that the priority in processing is to “protect the balance of public finances, i.e. in an unfavorable economic situation”.

The legal decree, he explains, increases the attractiveness of investments mainly through the opening of special economic development zones (ZEDE) and/or free zones, and aims to attract new industries of goods and services that have not yet been developed in our country attracting foreign direct investment, promoting Ecuador as an attractive and suitable investment destination. “This scheme has a fundamental goal: to create jobs that in turn create wealth for the population of Ecuador. Urgent and urgent need”, he points out.

The general idea is to create both tax and tariff incentives to get more companies to locate in the country and create more business, exports and employment.

The accompanying document shows that in Ecuador only three out of every ten Ecuadorians are fully employed and foreign direct investment in the country is low. It also ensures that the country lags behind its South American neighbors. When the accumulated flows of FDI received during the period 2016-2020 are taken into account, it ranks seventh, only above nations such as Paraguay, Venezuela and Bolivia.

He also remembers that the plan to create opportunities had several goals:

As in the explanation of the previous legal regulation, it is stated that the authority to determine whether it is an urgent case or not belongs to the executive branch, while constitutional analysis was assigned to the court.

The document states that “The President of the Republic can issue economic emergency law decrees, leaving only to his discretion and authority the qualification of the economic emergency law decree. So that the Constitutional Court can only carry out abstract normative control, but not the qualification of economic urgency”.

In this way, Lasso asked the President of the Constitutional Court, Alí ​​Lozada, to issue a positive opinion on the preliminary review of the constitutionality of the Decree of the Reform Organic Law to attract and promote investments for productive development, according to Article 148 of the Constitution of the Republic.

There will be two hearings next week. On Tuesday the 6th, there will be a debate on the Regulation on tax issues, and on June 8 there will be a debate on the issue of free zones.