The Pundits Still Don’t Understand Venezuela – OpEd

Hugo Chávez’s political coalition had every right to complain in the 1990s. Venezuela’s bipartisan political order from 1958 to 1988 delivered lackluster results. In this time period, Venezuela’s per capita GDP grew at a paltry -0.13%, meaning that Venezuelan population grew faster than the wealth created during this period. Charles Jones of Introduction to Economic Growth classified Venezuela as a “growth disaster”. Only a handful of Sub-Saharan countries and Nicaragua, a country under socialist rule and a victim of a bloody civil war, joined this economic hall of shame. Sadly, Chávez used the same petro-state structure for his own tyrannical ends. He doubled down on the errors of the previous decades and brought the country to its knees through easy money, economic controls, land confiscation, and vote-buying. More…