How Does Venezuela Compare To The World's Worst Managed Economies?

Outside of Venezuela, around the world, controlling inflation is seen as the primary concern of most central bankers. In the economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s inflation soared in as a series of economic shocks rocked Latin America. During a hyperinflation crisis in Peru in 1990 prices doubled every two weeks after the government embarked on a spending spree. Likewise, in Nicaragua, prices soared in the late eighties as the revolutionary Sandinista government tried to bolster the country’s war-ravaged economy with an aggressive program of expansionary fiscal policy. Looking at the deleterious effects of these periods of hyperinflation, the region’s central bankers have made stamping out inflation and promoting economic stability their number one priority. Latin America, with its longstanding and heavy reliance on natural resource exports, is remarkably vulnerable to boom and bust cycles as commodity prices rise and fall. More…