Chavez administration'spublic policies pushing Venezuela towards a precipice

Published: Friday, September 03, 2010
Bylined to: VenEconomy


VenEconomy: The Hugo Chavez administration's arrogance is preventing the country's institutions from honestly evaluating their performance and correcting the public policies that are pushing Venezuela towards a precipice. And in its eagerness to centralize the flow of information, the government is also preventing private institutions from promoting a debate of the situation.

Information on the deplorable state of the country thanks to the Chavez administration is being provided by groups outside the government: either by Venezuelan NGOs such as Transparencia Venezuela, Cedice, and, more recently, by the Coalition for Democratic Unity, which prepared a report on the food crisis in Venezuela, which also has implications for Venezuelans' health and pockets, and is the direct consequence of the government's wrongheaded social and economic policies, or most often, by reputable international agencies known for their independence of criteria and total credibility whose practice it is to analyze the economies and public policies of hundreds of countries.

From the World Bank to opinion forums and universities to nongovernment organizations, there are groups of people who measure the performance of countries in areas as diverse as economic freedoms, transparency in government, investment and business climate, competitiveness, human rights, freedom of speech, and violence and the lack of security.

And all these measurements have two common threads:

1) the higher a country's rating, the better the quality of life and standard of living of its population; and

2) the freer the economy, the greater its growth over time.

Another common factor in these measurements is that, in recent years, in the times of Chavez, Venezuela's ratings have been getting steadily and consistently worse. In practically all of the ten world indexes, Chavez' Venezuela is among the last in the ranking and, in most cases, side by side with poorer and poorly administered African countries.

For example, the Index of Economic Freedom 2010 issued by the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal ranks Venezuela 174 out of 182 countries. This classifies Venezuela as a repressed economy, ranking only above countries such as Burma-Eritrea, Cuba, Zimbabwe, and North Korea. Venezuela is even way below Ecuador and Bolivia.

Another worrisome rating is revealed by Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index 2009, where Venezuela ranked 162 out of 180 countries and 30 (out of 31) in Latin America, ahead only of Haiti.

It can be inferred from the results of nearly a dozen world indexes that, if the Chavez administration wanted to correct the negative course on which it has set Venezuela, all it would have to do would be to design policies based on those same international indicators of good government and solid economies.