Will the Venezuelan capital see brighter times ahead?
One of the most damning verdicts on the late Hugo Chavez’s leadership of Venezuela came from a doctor who made a name for himself by claiming to have inside knowledge of the cancer that eventually killed the president.
Dr Jose Rafael Marquina, a Venezuelan based in Miami, repeatedly predicted that Mr Chavez’s illness would prove terminal, providing detailed accounts of what he said was the president’s course of treatment.
His statements were given extensive coverage by the opposition media in Venezuela, eager to fill the vacuum left by the lack of official information about Mr Chavez’s condition.
But whatever the truth of Dr Marquina’s medical diagnosis, his broader criticism of the president’s record hits home. As he said during an interview with the Tal Cual newspaper in December 2012: “Chavez dealt with his illness the way he dealt with the country – in an improvised fashion.”
That habit of impromptu policymaking was integral to Mr Chavez’s style, right from the start of his 14 years in power.
Time and again, the president would make major decisions on an ad hoc basis, often during the course of his rambling and unscripted weekly TV broadcast to the nation, known as Alo Presidente.
He was particularly prone to quick-fix solutions in economic policy, resorting to regular currency devaluations, expropriations of private firms and inflation-busting public-sector pay rises rather than tackling the economy’s underlying structural problems.
This fire-fighting approach continued even as Mr Chavez lingered on his Cuban sickbed, with Vice-President Nicolas Maduro implementing a 32% devaluation of the bolivar in February.
As a result, Mr Chavez bequeaths a nation beset by crumbling infrastructure, unsustainable public spending and underperforming industry.
Thanks to his social programmes, poorer Venezuelans have certainly benefited from the country’s oil wealth more than they did under what he called the rotten elites that used to be in charge.
But there are strong suspicions that much money has been wasted – not just through corruption, but also sheer incompetence.
During Hugo Chavez’s time in office, from 1999 to the present day, income inequality in Venezuela gradually declined, as it did in most of the region.
The country now boasts the fairest income distribution in Latin America, as measured by the Gini coefficient index.
Brazil’s economy has grown faster than Venezuela’s
In 2011, Venezuela’s Gini coefficient fell to 0.39. By way of comparison, Brazil’s was 0.52, in itself a historic low.
So every Venezuelan now has a more equal slice of the cake. The trouble is, that cake has not been getting much bigger.
“Venezuela is the fifth largest economy in Latin America, but during the last decade, it’s been the worst performer in GDP per capita growth,” says Arturo Franco of the Center for International Development at Harvard University.
As Mr Franco says, it depends on how you measure Venezuela’s progress.
If you compare life under Mr Chavez with the previous 20 years, under a now discredited two-party system widely blamed for rampant corruption, the Chavez era is preferable.
But if you look at the superior economic performance of neighbouring Brazil and Colombia during the same period, it suddenly doesn’t look so rosy.
And given that the price of a barrel of oil is now roughly 10 times what it was when Mr Chavez was first elected, his opponents say that he could and should have done more.
Categories: news
"Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Galatians 6:7