Rafael Correa

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Rafael Correa
Correa in 2013
45th President of Ecuador
In office 15 January 2007 – 24 May 2017
Vice President	Lenín Moreno Jorge Glas
Preceded by	Alfredo Palacio
Succeeded by	Lenín Moreno
President of the PAIS Alliance
In office 2 April 2006 – 1 May 2017
Preceded by	Party established
Succeeded by	Lenín Moreno
Minister of Economy and Finance
In office 20 April 2005 – 9 August 2005
President	Alfredo Palacio
Preceded by	Mauricio Yépez
Succeeded by	Magdalena Barreiro
Personal details
Born	Rafael Vicente Correa Delgado (1963-04-06) 6 April 1963 (age 61) Guayaquil, Ecuador
Political party	PAIS Alliance (until 2018) Citizen Revolution Movement (since 2018)
Other political affiliations	Acuerdo Nacional [es] (since 2018)
Spouse	Anne Malherbe Gosselin ​ ​ (m. 1992)​
Children	3
Alma mater	Catholic University of Guayaquil (BA) UCLouvain (MA) University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (MS, PhD)
Signature

Rafael Vicente Correa Delgado (Spanish pronunciation: [rafaˈel βiˈsente koˈre.a ðelˈɣaðo]; born 6 April 1963) is an Ecuadorian politician and economist who served as President of Ecuador from 2007 to 2017. The leader of the PAIS Alliance political movement from its foundation until 2017, Correa is a democratic socialist and his administration focused on the implementation of left-wing policies. Internationally, he served as president pro tempore of the UNASUR.

Born to a lower middle-class mestizo family in Guayaquil, Correa studied economics at the Universidad Católica de Santiago de Guayaquil, the University of Louvain (UCLouvain), and the University of Illinois, where he received his PhD. Returning to Ecuador, in 2005 he became the Minister for the Economy under President Alfredo Palacio, successfully lobbying Congress for increased spending on health and education projects.

Correa won the presidency in the 2006 general election on a platform criticizing the established political elites. Taking office in January 2007, he sought to move away from Ecuador's neoliberal economic model by reducing the influence of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. He oversaw the introduction of a new constitution, being re-elected in 2009 and again in the 2013 general election.

Correa's presidency was part of the Latin American pink tide, a turn toward leftist governments in the region, allying himself with Hugo Chávez's Venezuela and bringing Ecuador into the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas in June 2009.^[1] Using its own form of 21st century socialism, Correa's administration increased government spending, reducing poverty, raising the minimum wage and increasing the standard of living in Ecuador. Between 2006 and 2016, poverty decreased from 36.7% to 22.5% and annual per capita GDP growth was 1.5 percent (as compared to 0.6 percent over the prior two decades). At the same time, economic inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, decreased from 0.55 to 0.47.^[1][2][3] By the end of Correa's tenure, the 50% drop in the price of oil since 2014 had caused Ecuador's economy to enter a recession, resulting in government spending being slashed.^[1][2][3][4]

On 3 July 2018, a judge in Ecuador ordered a warrant for the arrest of Correa after he failed to appear in court during a trial surrounding the kidnapping of his political opponent Fernando Balda. Correa, who lived in Belgium at the time, denied the allegations regarding the kidnapping.^[5] In July 2018 Interpol rejected an Ecuador-issued arrest warrant and called it "obviously a political matter."^[6] In April 2020 the Criminal Court of the National Court of Justice found the former president guilty of aggravated passive bribery in the Caso Sobornos 2012-2016.^{[clarification needed]} He was sentenced in absentia to 8 years in prison.^[7]