Economy

Imports
$29.8 billion (2023). Refined Petroleum ($4.22B), Coal Tar Oil ($2.29B), Cars ($1.39B), Packaged Medicaments ($861M), and Soybean Meal ($689M), importing mostly from United States ($8.19B), China ($5.98B), Colombia ($2.19B), Brazil ($1.24B), and Peru ($1.12B).

Financial inclusion factors (over 15 years of  age)
• 64.2% have an account with a financial institution
• 14.8% have a credit card
• 2.9% have a mobile money account
• 9.7% make online purchases

Ease of doing business
Ease of conducting business is medium (rated 57.7 out of 100). Ranked 21st out of 32 Latin American and Caribbean countries. Ranked 129th out of 190 countries worldwide (2022, World Bank)

Exports
$37.3 billion (2023). Crude Petroleum ($13.1B), Crustaceans ($6.88B), Bananas ($4.51B), Gold ($1.5B), and Processed Fish ($1.37B), exporting mostly to United States ($8.34B), China ($7.96B), Panama ($4.38B), Japan ($1.24B), and Peru ($1.15B).

In 2023, Ecuador was the world’s biggest exporter of Crustaceans ($6.88B) and Bananas ($4.51B)

Main local online stores
olx.com.ec, mercadolibe.com.ec and amazon.com.

Economic freedom
‘Mostly not free’ (rated 55 out of 100). Ranked 22nd out of 32 Latin American countries. Ranked 115th out of 184 countries worldwide (2022, Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal).

Global Innovation Index
Ranked 16th out of 19 Latin American and Caribbean countries, and 104th out of 132 worldwide.

The Global Innovation Index captures the innovation
ecosystem performance of 132 economies and tracks the most recent global innovation trends.

Media

Media language Spanish

Information channels
Freedoms in Ecuador for media outlets and civil society expanded under President Lenín Moreno, who left office in 2021, says the US-based NGO Freedom House.
However, continuing challenges include official corruption, violations of legal processes, as well as violence in prisons and during protests.
Challenges to press freedom remain. In October 2021, President Lasso sent a letter to El Universo, one of the country’s most prestigious newspapers, complaining that its coverage of the Pandora Papers was unfair. The letter was widely condemned by local media outlets as an attempt to influence the paper’s editorial independence.
Most media are privately-run and ownership is highly concentrated. Radio is an important medium; there are hundreds of stations, some broadcasting in indigenous languages. Soap operas and US series are staple fare on TV.

The press

El Comercio – daily
El Tiempo – daily
La Hora – evening daily, regional editions
El Telegrafo – daily
El Universo – Guayaquil-based daily
Expreso – Guayaquil-based daily

Television

TC Television – private
Ecuavisa – private
RTS – private
Gamavision – private
Teleamazonas – private
Telerama – private
Ecuador TV – public

Radio

Radio Vision – private, Quito and Guayaquil
Radio Quito – private
Cadena Radial Ecuatoriana (CRE) – private, Guayaquil-based network
Radio Centro – private
Radio Sucre – private, national news network
Publica FM – public

Internet Data

Internet users
83.6% penetration, 15.29 million

Share of web traffic by device
51.86% mobile phones, 47.04% computers (laptops and desktops), 1.07% tablet devices and 0.03% other devices

Median speed of mobile Internet connection
21.54  Mbps

Median speed of fixed Internet connection
77.65 Mbps

Mobile connection as a percentage of total population: 96%

Percentage of mobile connections that are broadband (3G-5G): 98.4%

Most popular web search engines
Google (94.82%), Bing (4.58%), Yahoo! (0.29%), DuckDuckGo (0.1%), Yandex (0.09%), other (0.13%)

Most used social media
Facebook (52.25%), YouTube (15.34%), Instagram (14.47%), Pinterest (13.9%), Twitter (2.55%), LinkedIn (0.98%), Reddit (0.31%), other (0.21%)

Social statistics

Life expectancy
78 years (2022)

Gender
Ecuador has many cultural and social contradictions: it is both conservative and progressive at the same time. Women can work on anything they want, if they want to. But at the same time, opportunities are enjoyed on the basis on one’s social class and they are very few programs to change that fact.

Current education expenditure
97.5% of total expenditure in public institutions (2020)

Corruption perceptions Index
Ecuador scored 36 out of 100, ranked 101 out 180 countries worldwide (2022).

The CPI measures the perception of corruption due to the difficulty of measuring absolute levels of corruption.

Current health expenditure
8.29% of GDP (2021)

CO2 emissions
2.59 metric tons per capita (2022)

Religion, Ethnicity & Class
One of the die-hard colonial legacies is hierarchy based mostly on ethnicity, gender and class rather than religion. Ethnicity and class generally go with shade of one’s skin: more money is located in the hands of the lighter skinned and less money is available to darker people. Natives (~40% of the population) and blacks (~7-10% of the population) are the most disadvantaged, followed by mestizos (~45-50% of the population). Most workplaces would typically have the following composition and ratios: technical staff = mestizos mostly male, majority; support staff = mostly female, mestizos; middle management = male, mestizo/white, upper management or senior staff = male, white. This makes for interesting power relations: those in high echelons expect deference and submission from those below them. Higher educational attainment and access to money among those who are typically at the bottom of the social scale is eroding this structure.

World Happiness Index
Ecuador ranked 76 out of 146 countries, with a score of 5.533.

The World Happiness Index measures happiness based on respondent ratings of their own lives, correlated with other life factors.