Oil-rich Venezuela’s miracle — record poverty

The recent history of oil-rich Venezuela should be taught in universities around the world as a textbook case of an economic miracle in reverse: despite having benefited from the biggest oil boom in recent history, the country has managed to be poorer.

A joint new study by three leading Venezuelan universities — Andres Bello Catholic University, Central University of Venezuela, and Simon Bolivar University — shows that 48.4 percent of Venezuelan households were below the poverty line in 2014, up from 45 percent of households in 1998, before late radical leftist President Hugo Chávez took office and benefited from nearly a decade of soaring world oil prices.

Luis Pedro España, a Andres Bello Catholic University professor who co-authored the study, told me in a telephone interview that the nationwide survey of 5, 400 people was done in October last year, and has a margin of error of 3 percentage points. The survey used the same methodology as a similar study done in 1998 by the government’s office of statistics, which was supervised by a United Nations agency, he said.

The new study is in sharp contrast to Venezuelan government figures, which claim that poverty has decreased in Venezuela under Chávez’s “socialist revolution.”

To continue reading this article click The Miami Herald