Oil-rich Venezuela gripped by economic crisis
by Juan Forero
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, April 29, 2010
SAN CRISTOBAL, VENEZUELA — Every day for the past three months, government-programmed blackouts have meant the lights flicker and go dark in a city that once bustled with commerce. And Fifth Street, with its auto parts stores and car repair shops, has ground to a halt.
“We just stop,” said Jesus Yanis, who paints cars. “We don’t work.”
Neither does the rest of Venezuela, where a punishing, months-old energy crisis and years of state interventions in the economy are taking a brutal toll on private business. The result is that the economy is flickering and going dark, too, challenging Venezuela’s mercurial leader, Hugo Chávez, and his socialist experiment like never before.
No matter that Venezuela is one of the world’s great oil powers — among the top five providers of crude to the United States. Economists say Venezuela is gripped by an economic crisis that has no easy or fast solution, even if sluggish oil production were ramped up and profligate state spending were cut.
“The government is paralyzed, unable to handle the situation — and there are no fiscal plans to deal with the crisis,” said José Guerra, a former Central Bank economist who directs the economics department at Central University in Caracas, the capital. “Our situation is unbelievable, because we have one of the biggest reserves of oil in the world, thermal-electrical and hydroelectric sources.”
Chávez still hails what he calls his “21st-century socialism” as the answer to the American-style capitalism he calls an abject failure. But through his long tenure, the Venezuelan economy has expanded by an average of less than 3 percent a year, even as the price of oil hit a historic high of $150 a barrel in 2008.
Last year, the economy slid 3.3 percent. Some economists, including Guerra, predict a 5 percent contraction this year. The International Monetary Fund says the economy will probably shrink 2 percent.
Venezuela’s performance stands in stark contrast to the rest of Latin America, where some central banks worry about overheating economies in 2010. In Peru, Chile and Brazil, all of which embrace globalization, growth could indeed go well beyond 4 percent, the IMF says. Venezuela, economists say, stands out — its economic policies marked by the nationalization of industries and stringent currency controls.
“The reason Venezuela is contracting is because private activity is contracting,” Augusto de la Torre, the World Bank’s chief economist for Latin America, said in Washington last week. “What we’re seeing in Venezuela is a phenomenon where productivity, private activity and private business is falling.”
Paralysis and polls
The oil industry is pumping 20 percent less crude than in the 1990s and is saddled with debt. The country’s inflation rate could hit 35 percent this year, economists say. Thousands of factories, paralyzed by a failure to access money or spare parts, have closed since 1999, said Carlos Larrazábal, president of Coindustria, which represents manufacturing nationwide.
At Three M, a metal mechanics workshop here, manager Marta Medina has had to reduce her workforce from more than 50 employees a year ago to eight. She describes problems coming from every direction: blackouts that have burned out motors on huge machinery, a shortage of spare parts, falling orders.
“We have losses, we have uncertainty, we lose credibility as a company,” Medina said.
Any opinions or viewpoints that are published herein are directly from the contributing author and does not necessarily represent the philosophy or viewpoints of Latin America Bureau