Economic and social disparities at the provincial level in Ecuador, change of the productive matrix and territorial convergence processes.

Like many Latin American countries, today's Ecuador has marked subnational economic disparities that are reflected in a heterogeneous territorial typology, visible at least in differentiated economic-productive and social characteristics at the provincial level. From the 90s, a series of compensatory strategies and policies are implemented in Ecuador, aimed at closing the existing territorial gaps. Since 2007, with the Code of Territorial Planning, Autonomy and Decentralization, the closing policies of territorial asymmetries, playing a preponderant role of the National Secretariat of Planning and Development (Senplades), take a new impulse. Likewise, since 2009 there are a series of government projects leading to a reconversion of the local productive matrix, whose primary objective is to generate territorial convergence. However, neither the subnational heterogeneous nature has been analyzed in the country with sufficient depth, much less the conditions under which these compensatory strategies and local productive diversification would contribute to generate a territorial economic convergence in Ecuador have been evaluated. The problem of territorial disparities has been addressed by various theoretical and methodological approaches that have revolved around the hypothesis of neoclassical convergence; According to which it is commendable that the lagged territories, both economically and socially, will present growth rates greater than the rich territories, converging all to a common balance, with what in the long term, the gaps would close. This hypothesis was called the "absolute convergence", whose verification would be weak, giving way to the so-called "relative convergence", according to which, the long-term performance would be defined by the economic-productive and social characteristics of each territory, opening the way to the possibility of supporting the asymmetries, at the time of proposing a methodological tool that allows to evaluate the assets of the acceleration. Of the processes of territorial convergence within the countries. Welcoming this framework, the present investigation is drawn as an objective to analyze the existing economic and social disparities at the provincial level in Ecuador, so that it is possible to understand the productive characteristics of each one, the degree of convergence between them, and the conditions through which the processes of national productive diversification would benefit the convergence. For which there is an ideal research team, with access to secondary information required, and adequate institutional and scientific interrelations, so that it results in the production of significant scientific knowledge, both for academics, researchers and students, as well as decision makers, so that a contribution to the debate of local economic development policies is generated. In this sense, for the second half of 2014, the Research Directorate of the University of Cuenca awarded a budget for the strengthening of the Regional Economics Research Group, meaning this proposal a palpable result of mentioned investment, and which requires the desirable continuity to undertake in further objectives as represented by the publication of scientific articles and the dissemination of infographic bulletins.

XIII UNIVERSITY COMPETITION FOR RESEARCH PROJECTS