The Constitutional Court gave a negative opinion on the “Reform Organic Law for Attracting and Encouraging Investments for Productive Development”, aimed at encouraging the development of free zones, which was presented by the President of the Republic, in accordance with the powers that, exceptionally, are allowed by Article 148 of the Constitution, which states: “The President of the Republic can, after a positive decision of the Constitutional Court, issue laws on the state of emergency, which the legislative body can approve or repeal”. The court remains in its opinion that it would not be considered an economic emergency: “This project in itself does not represent the norm of economic urgency in the exceptional scenario provided for in Article 148 of the Constitution.” This planning has caused doubts and differing opinions about whether the Court is responsible for determining whether what the President has proposed is urgent for the country’s economy or not, and this article does not intend to engage in an expert debate on that topic. But I consider it a suitable situation that we are interested in knowing the economic reality.

According to official data presented in January of this year, and considering the level of income, the poverty rate in our country is 25.2%, and the extreme poverty rate is 8.2%. This translates into unemployment, lack of drinking water, sanitation, adequate food, care for health problems, child malnutrition, school dropouts, insecure housing and lack of job and professional development opportunities. The consequences are visible: children and adults who beg for alms on the streets, young victims of the temptation of easy money who become members of gangs, murderers, drug dealers, thieves, fraudsters whose ultimate goal is prison or violence. be victims or perpetrators.

Faced with these circumstances, it is impossible to ignore the importance of a healthy economy. The word economy is derived from two Greek roots: oikoswhich means home, house and nomes, meaning rules, laws, administration. It originally referred to household management. Today, economics is a social science that studies how to manage available resources to meet people’s needs. In other words, it is still managing a home, but the home of all of us who live in a certain territory. And a household is a group of people who, united by kinship or not, share the same home and come together to meet their needs.

If we place this in our reality, it means that we all form, should form, the home that is Ecuador and in which, as indicated in the previous paragraph, there are many who are not included in the goods and services to which they belong under the name of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights rights reminds us of that. If we don’t see it that way, maybe all of us, including intellectuals, businessmen and judges, should put ourselves in the place of the 33% of Ecuadorians who live in poverty, and then we would better understand how urgent it is to make decisions that lead to changing that reality. (OR)