Skip to main content

10 years under Chavez (a mainstream economic report card)

While I am of the opinion the revolution in Venezuela must continue to move forward and end current property relations or it is doomed to fail; I'm certainly not against enacting progressive reforms along the way. The following report gives an idea of what has been accomplished so far. (Obviously, at least from my point of view, not everything is positive. Many of these programs show their limitations within the confines of a capitalist system.) It was done by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a research institute with Nobel laureates Joe Stiglitz and Robert Solow, among others, on its advisory board.

http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/venezuela-2009-02.pdf


Key points (as taken from the report):

* The current economic expansion began when the government got control over the national oil company in the first quarter of 2003. Since then, real (inflation-adjusted) GDP has nearly doubled, growing by 94.7 percent in 5.25 years, or 13.5 percent annually.

* Most of this growth has been in the non-oil sector of the economy, and the private sector has grown faster than the public sector.

* During the current economic expansion, the poverty rate has been cut by more than half, from 54 percent of households in the first half of 2003 to 26 percent at the end of 2008. Extreme poverty has fallen even more, by 72 percent. These poverty rates measure only cash income, and does not take into account increased access to health care or education.

* Over the entire decade, the percentage of households in poverty has been reduced by 39 percent, and extreme poverty by more than half.

* Inequality, as measured by the Gini index, has also fallen substantially. The index has fallen to 41 in 2008, from 48.1 in 2003 and 47 in 1999. This represents a large reduction in inequality.

* Real (inflation-adjusted) social spending per person more than tripled from 1998-2006.

* From 1998-2006, infant mortality has fallen by more than one third. The number of primary care physicians in the public sector increased 12-fold from 1999-2007, providing health care to millions of Venezuelans who previously did not have access.

* There have been substantial gains in education, especially higher education, where gross enrollment rates more than doubled from 1999/2000 to 2007/2008.

* The labor market also improved substantially over the last decade, with unemployment dropping from 11.3 percent to 7.8 percent. During the current expansion it has fallen by more than half. Other labor market indicators also show substantial gains.

* Over the past decade, the number of social security beneficiaries has more than
doubled.

* Over the decade, the government's total public debt has fallen from 30.7 to 14.3 percent of GDP. The foreign public debt has fallen even more, from 25.6 to 9.8 percent of GDP.

* Inflation is about where it was 10 years ago, ending the year at 31.4 percent. However it has been falling over the last half year (as measured by three-month averages) and is likely to continue declining this year in the face of strong deflationary pressures worldwide.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

  I voted for Joe Biden and hope he wins. I’m also alarmed at the increasingly transparent alliance between the Democratic Party and influential sectors of corporate America, namely media conglomerates and the technology industry. (Their relationship reminds me of the Republican Party and the energy industry.) It’s true there are conservative media outlets that are not friendly to Democrats, but it’s far less certain how objective the “paper of record” and other “serious” media would be to a post-Trump and post-COVID Biden administration that is politically and ascetically their peer. (I would say we are at a point of competing Pravdas, but that would be a slander against the Soviet newspaper’s pre-Stalinist period when it was a battleground of ideas.) Perhaps even more damning is the Democratic Party’s relationship to the technology industry, particularly when companies like Twitter and Facebook have shown they are prepared to unilaterally decide what’s true and what’s false. Not many
I’m somewhat familiar with the story, but haven’t seen the tv series “the plot against America.” Is it any good? I’ll admit I have doubts that will be difficult to overcome. My guess is it’s a well stylized but historically simplified attempt to frame international liberalism, particularly the US dominated post war order, as something deeper than what it has become- a value championed almost exclusively by the cosmopolitan elite and global corporations. I also predict that the entire post WW1 context (three months involvement and almost 120,000 Americans dead, split evenly between fighting and the flu pandemic) is lost to Lindbergh and his anti-Semitism. Is this accurate? “The man in the high castle,” another alternative history book made into a tv series that I actually did watch, missed an opportunity to dig into American militarism by not really explaining why so many high level American military members joined the Nazis. (We were supposed to believe it’s just because the Germans wo

Leftism is Just Exclamation Point Liberalism

  The February issue of Harper’s Magazine poses the question “Is Liberalism Worth Saving?” on its cover. The panel of four, who more or less cover the mainstream of the ideological spectrum, for the most part give familiar praise and criticism. One panelist, however, gives a forceful and fundamental critique of liberalism. That person is not the representative of the left. To be sure, the left representative makes all the standard criticisms of classical liberalism (imperialism, racism, inequality) but these issues have all been confronted, for decades, within forms of political liberalism like social democracy and even neoliberalism. The real underlying critique of liberalism, the one that challenges its foundational tenets, is coming from the post-liberal right.  This is relatively new.  Because being marginalized and uninfluential are baked into the ethos of the radical left, something I definitely internalized while attempting to organize first as an anarchist and then a Trotskyis