http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/03/06/venezuelas-economy-under-chavez-by-the-numbers/

3/7/2013 1:09:54 PM

wow, someone sucks at making graphs.

3/7/2013 1:11:22 PM

Aha, just realized they don't have headers. First is GDP growth, 2nd is inflation.

3/7/2013 1:16:48 PM

lol. Saw the second graph and thought "Venezuela is kicking ass!"

3/7/2013 2:03:50 PM

The first one is not GDP growth, I don't know of many countries with 100+ growth rates. The first one is also not GDP, as Venezuela has probably $100b more than most of the others. I don't know what silly statistic it is, but I'll be willing to bet it's not meaningful. Why don't you explain their GDP production, or heck even just per capita?

The second one is possibly the most dishonest things I seen on TWW for a while. You picked the most stable currency (Peru's), and two others that are pegged against foreign currencies. But besides your attempt at misleading, again I would ask, what does that matter compared to GDP?

Per capita GDP is the best measure of a country's economy yet with all the statements you make about Venezuela you completely ignore it.

The article you linked make the same arguments I debated earlier, that either:
1. Chavez isn't drilling oil fast enough
2. Chavez isn't letting foreign investors drill it fast enough.

Chavez's unwillingness to completely exploit his natural resources as fast as possible and sell it out to foreigners only show his genuineness. Oppressive dictators generally sell their country's natural resources out to foreigners and use the proceeds to enrich themselves. Chavez has focused on having Venezuela drill it's own oil at a sustainable pace and use the proceeds to help the poor.

3/7/2013 6:30:48 PM

gini graph for same period/countries?

Quote :

"Aha, just realized they don't have headers. First is GDP growth, 2nd is inflation."

or units or sources

[Edited on March 7, 2013 at 6:37 PM. Reason : .]

3/7/2013 6:36:10 PM

UN's Human Development Index



Venezuela was not the greatest but not also not the worst.
http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/

[Edited on March 7, 2013 at 8:35 PM. Reason : derp.]

3/7/2013 8:34:33 PM

I want to point out again that I'm certainly not saying that Chavez was the best ever, it's difficult to tell, but he was far from the worst.

3/7/2013 11:19:51 PM

I happen to like this write-up, which illustrates Chavez as a charismatic leader but a particularly poor steward of the economy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/opinion/in-the-end-chavez-was-an-awful-manager.html?hp

Quote :

"The endless debate about whether Mr. Chávez was a dictator or democrat — he was in fact a hybrid, an elected autocrat — distracted attention, at home and abroad, from the more prosaic issue of competence. Mr. Chávez was a brilliant politician and a disastrous ruler. He leaves Venezuela a ruin, and his death plunges its roughly 30 million citizens into profound uncertainty. Mr. Chávez’s failures did more damage than ideology, which was never as extremist as he or his detractors made out, something all too evident in the Venezuela he bequeaths. The once mighty factories of Ciudad Guayana, an industrial hub by the Orinoco River that M.I.T. and Harvard architects planned in the 1960s, are rusting and wheezing, some shut, others at half-capacity. “The world economic crisis hit us,” Rada Gamluch, the director of the aluminum plant Venalum, and a loyal chavista, told me on his balcony overlooking the decay. He corrected himself. “The capitalist crisis hit us.” Actually, it was bungling by Chávez-appointed business directors who tried to impose pseudo-Marxist principles, only to be later replaced by opportunists and crooks, that hit Ciudad Guayana. Underinvestment and ineptitude hit hydropower stations and the electricity grid, causing weekly blackouts that continue to darken cities, fry electrical equipment, silence machinery and require de facto rationing. The government has no shortage of scapegoats: its own workers, the C.I.A. and even cable-gnawing possums. Reckless money printing and fiscal policies triggered soaring inflation, so much so that the currency, the bolívar, lost 90 percent of its value since Mr. Chávez took office, and was devalued five times over a decade. In another delusion, the currency had been renamed “el bolívar fuerte,” the strong bolívar — an Orwellian touch. Harassment of privately owned farms and chaotic administration of state-backed agricultural cooperatives hit food production, compelling extensive imports, which stacked up so fast thousands of tons rotted at the ports. Mr. Chávez called it “food sovereignty.” Politicization and neglect crippled the state-run oil company PDVSA’s core task — drilling — so that production slumped. “It’s a pity no one took 20 minutes to explain macroeconomics to him with a pen and paper,” Baldo Sanso, a senior executive told me."

3/8/2013 11:50:51 AM

Quote :

"The once mighty factories of Ciudad Guayana, an industrial hub by the Orinoco River that M.I.T. and Harvard architects planned in the 1960s, are rusting and wheezing, some shut, others at half-capacity."

That could describe Detroit or numerous other cities as well.

Quote :

"nderinvestment and ineptitude hit hydropower stations and the electricity grid, causing weekly blackouts that continue to darken cities, fry electrical equipment, silence machinery and require de facto rationing. The government has no shortage of scapegoats: its own workers, the C.I.A. and even cable-gnawing possums."

This one I agree with and is a justified criticism of Chavez, there's no excuse that such an energy rich nation should have so many problems providing energy and the responsibility for this falls solely on Chavez.

Quote :

"Politicization and neglect crippled the state-run oil company PDVSA’s core task — drilling — so that production slumped. “It’s a pity no one took 20 minutes to explain macroeconomics to him with a pen and paper,” Baldo Sanso, a senior executive told me.""

Again with this stupid criticism? Reducing oil production is not neccesarily a bad thing, you can't call a leader incompetitent for not running as fast as possible into a Malthusian catastrophe.

3/8/2013 1:18:28 PM

Look. You can't criticize a socialist for not falling in line to the rules of macroeconomics. You can argue the economic legacy if you want, but during Chavez's tenure, extreme poverty in Venezuela was drastically reduced. Universal healthcare became a reality, and public education was extended to more people in the country than ever before (even at the university level). Argue the macroeconomics if you want (or the absurd argument of not pillaging the earth fast enough!), but you can't deny that the standard of living for most Venezuelan's improved during his presidency. And you can't deny his popularity, either, as is evidenced by his election results and the intense grieving going on right now in the country.

It's an issue of priorities, and for most Venezuelans, having a robust oil company in town isn't as important as having access to basic social services. That's why they voted for him.

3/8/2013 1:34:29 PM

You act like it's an either/or proposition. Oil wealth paid for all those social services, only Chavez's horrible mismanagement of the industry crippled the golden goose to the point where Venezuela had to take on massive debt from the Chinese.

Quote :

"Reducing oil production is not neccesarily a bad thing, you can't call a leader incompetitent for not running as fast as possible into a Malthusian catastrophe."

He didn't reduce oil production by choice. PDVSA's workforce is twice the size it was 10 years ago, when they were producing much more oil. As i said on page 1, Chavez traveled to numerous OPEC countries trying to figure why his own oil industry was so anemic and inefficient despite more reserves than anyone aside from Saudi Arabia. He constantly leaned on the PDVSA to ramp up production.

Malthusian Catastrophe? Really? They have more than 500 billion barrels of oil and they only produce 2.4 million per day. I'll do the math for you; their reserves would last 570 years at current production. You know damn well that oil won't be a transportation fuel in 100 years, let alone a half-millenium.

Production has fallen in Venezuela because of gross mismanagement. That'll happen when you kick out foreign investment, then sack company leaders and replace them with your socialist lackeys.

3/8/2013 2:00:08 PM

Quote :

"Oil wealth paid for all those social services"

Yeah, I understand this.

That's why this:

Quote :

"That'll happen when you kick out foreign investment"

Is particularly weak. Oil wealth was used to keep that money in Venezuela rather than in the bank accounts of foreign oil tycoons. That's why they were able to cut poverty down in half. And that's why they were able to have healthcare and education for more people.


If foreign companies came in and privatized a natural resource, Venezuela would have had the same number of people living in poverty that they had for decades before Chavez re-introduced the idea of a Bolivarian revolution to South America.

It's like your getting mad at a socialist for not adopting neo-liberal principles. Well no shit, he was opposed to that.

3/8/2013 2:09:47 PM

Where do you get this idea that Venezuela wouldn't still enjoy the bulk of the profits if they hadn't kicked Exxon and ConocoPhillips? Their oil extraction tax rate was at 67%. You seem to hold this ridiculous idea that if PDVSA partnered with Exxon, as they had done for decades, somehow Exxon would collect all the profits. Exxon was just hoping for a small sliver of that industry, and they invested nearly a billion dollars in a partnership with PDVSA before their equipment and infrastructure was seized. Do you not understand how partnership and investment works? Taxes? C'mon, man, this is Venezuela, not Africa in the turn of the 19th century.

Every country with an oil industry partners up with the big oil companies. Saudi Arabia does it, as does the rest of OPEC. They do so because those companies have the expertise and equipment to drill in deep waters, the engineers to maximize production, etc. That doesn't mean that the bulk of the profits flow right out of the country. It just means that the countries hired the experts to help them develop the industry, and negotiated a price for it. But what you can't do is seize hundreds of millions in assets without remuneration, scaring off other companies from investing in the future. That's a great way to shoot yourself in the foot and fuck up your entire oil industry.

3/8/2013 2:44:41 PM

Quote :

"They have more than 500 billion barrels of oil and they only produce 2.4 million per day. I'll do the math for you; their reserves would last 570 years at current production."

Glad I didn't let you do the math for me, it would be wrong:
(500000000000/2400000)/256.25=813
So 813 years by your numbers. But, of course, you've proven yourself dishonest, so I won't take your numbers at face value, especially without any source. I'd prefer to go by the wikipedia entry:

Quote :

"Already by 2009, Venezuela reported 211.17 billion barrels (3.3573×1010 m3) of conventional oil reserves, the largest of any country in South America.[6] In 2008, it had net oil exports of 1.189 Mbbl/d (189,000 m3/d) to the United States.[7] As a result of the lack of transparency in the country's accounting, Venezuela's true level of oil production is difficult to determine, but OPEC analysts estimate that it produced around 2.47 Mbbl/d (393,000 m3/d) of oil in 2009. This would give it 234 years of remaining production at current rates."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_Venezuela

Now that was just to correct your misinformation, my actual argument is that, first, all this assumes stable oil production, which is unlikely, secondly, producing that much oil is going to have a diminishing return, it will force prices down and produce less return for each additional barrel of oil. Sitting on extra oil is not a bad thing considering rising demand.

3/8/2013 3:01:07 PM

Quote :

"But what you can't do is seize hundreds of millions in assets without remuneration"

They've been paying remuneration. You can say it's not enough, but you're either lying or misinformed, and considering the amount of misinformation you've been using, I'm beginning to think it's the former.

3/8/2013 3:04:02 PM

Quote :

"(500000000000/2400000)/256.25=813 So 813 years by your numbers. But, of course, you've proven yourself dishonest, so I won't take your numbers at face value, especially without any source. I'd prefer to go by the wikipedia entry: "

Why are you using 256.25 days in a year? I doubt the "barrels/day" metric excludes weekends...

3/8/2013 3:28:01 PM

Quote :

"Where do you get this idea that Venezuela wouldn't still enjoy the bulk of the profits if they hadn't kicked Exxon and ConocoPhillips? "

History, mostly. You keep arguing macroeconomics. I'm just looking at the reduction of poverty and extreme poverty in Venezuela. And along with other measures, like healthcare, education, government run food markets, land reform policies, banking regulations that shifted the tax burden onto the wealthy, etc, it's easy to see why a nation that has seen extensive amounts of poverty and extreme poverty for decades would revere a leader like Chavez who assimilated the normally disenfranchised into the national voting bloc.

Venezuela had over 50% of its population living in poverty. That number has been cut in half, and the rates of extreme poverty were reduced by over 70% during his presidency. I highly doubt any of those people, who consist of over HALF THE COUNTRY, give a flying shit about how efficiently Exxon Mobile can get oil out of the ground. And they all know from experience that Exxon's efficiency wouldn't have benefited them one goddamn bit.

3/8/2013 3:30:54 PM

Bottom line is that Chavez and the Venezuelan economy under him are both a mixed bag, not bad enough to ignore the good, not good enough to ignore the bad.

3/11/2013 11:33:05 AM

Quote :

"not bad enough to ignore the good, not good enough to ignore the bad."

It's The Facts of Life Venezuela Edition.

3/11/2013 2:50:04 PM

he probably won't be able to be put on display because they forgot to start embalming him:

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/13/17300357-venezuelas-hugo-chavez-unlikely-to-be-preserved-for-eternity?lite

(i assume this was on purpose by people who don't want him on display)

3/14/2013 3:22:05 PM