Learning to appreciate

It is absolutely incredible. There is no anthropologist who understands it. Ours is a nation that dedicates serious effort to the art of national, religious, pagan and other such festivities. However, there is absolutely no mention of any holiday, not even a minor municipal one somewhere out in the wilds of Venezuela, to celebrate what undoubtedly must be the most important single object for the nation, its reserves of black gold.

The magazine Debates IESA recently published an article in which, precisely to create food for thought and debate, I tackle the subject of oil. I forward the possibility that our usual habit of labeling oil as something bad and disagreeable, to the point of actually calling what in most other nations would be considered to be God’s gift, the devil’s excrement, is simply part of an intelligent plot to cover up mistakes and avoid a severe audit of accounts.

While oil income continues to be considered “dirty” and has not been channeled through our pockets as ordinary citizens in order to avoid soiling or corrupting us, we will not give any importance to the efficiency with which the administrators to which we have delegated the task of handling these resources actually go about it. It would be another story, however, if this oil income would be considered squeaky clean and be the object of devout attention every Sunday at mass.

I ask you to reflect on the value of an educational program that would instill in even the poorest child the need to a) thank God for the Bs. 200,000 of oil income that would correspond to every single Venezuelan citizen (and which all of us have subrogated to the government in 1997), and b) to assume direct responsibility for its clean and correct administration.

Tongue in cheek aside, I am an economist and have a Master’s Degree in Business Administration. During my career if have learned, and taught, the basic precept that the most important step required in order to develop a solution to a problem is the clear identification of the resources you have on hand. Here, the opposite seems true. Colleagues, social planning gurus, VIPs and other such well-intentioned people seem to insist on preaching a model based on the theory that Venezuela should try to ignore its oil income. Something like supposing we decide that we should really be leaving the oil underground and immediately thereafter begin praying one hundred “ceteris paribus” to compensate for the fact that we continue pumping it anyhow.

Our oil income continues to exist, and all the efforts being undertaken under the umbrella of the oil sector opening seem to be aimed an increasing the same. In light of this reality, I propose in my article the thesis that maybe the best model for Venezuela is exactly a rentier one.

Many people would label this as heresy, but I steadfastly maintain that in my opinion, a rentier model has nothing to do with having a laid-back attitude or being a vagabond. On the contrary. A rentier model obligates us not only to save, but also to develop solid characters in order to assume the responsible management of our wealth to the benefit of future generations.

For example, experts from multilateral agencies and, of course, politicians thirsting for more resources to spend, seem to be basing their advice on models which are closer to being sado-masochistic than macro-economic. They advise us to completely ignore the horrifying experience we have been subjected to by our State administrators and to continue, in the name of fiscal deficit reduction, to pump more and more resources into our leaky fiscal system.

In stark contrast to this, we can well imagine the simple wisdom of the rentier model often used in the private sector and which motivates the owner of a company to cut off his capital contributions and avoid future indebtedness at all cost should his manager prove to be a useless failure after having misused the company’s resources.

I think, therefore, that an honest and simple application of a rentier model would allow us to identify with more clarity the true comparative advantages upon which to base Venezuela’s real development and which would in turn generate employment commensurate with our reality as an oil producing country.

Maybe then we could escape the mortal trap we have fallen into as a country by assuming that in order to initiate development we must substitute the traditional mix of incentives such as low prices for energy, communications and fertilizers with a salary structure almost comparative to a banana republic.

Certainly, it is not ethical to be poor rentiers and to throw out our income in order to work with the sweat of our brows. It would be ethical and logical to simply become excellent rentiers.

A child's question about the economy

During the last few years economic policy in Venezuela has given rise to some basic questions and issues that often go unnoticed or unanswered since many of them are so simple that they border on the infantile. When addressed, the answers frequently offered to these questions are similar to those we often give in desperation to our children when they overdo the question bit, that is, “because that’s the way it is” or “because I say so”!

I honestly believe that the future of our country depends to a high degree on the answers to some of these basic questions. Although I have studied in various countries, hold a post-graduate degree, and am a professional with lengthy experience in many areas related to the national economic scene, I will let my inner child roam and assume the role of that questioning boy for a brief moment.

There is firm consensus, both inside Venezuela as well as internationally, that our public administration has been basically inept, or more precisely, has been incredibly incapable of managing our resources. How can it be possible, then, that the Agenda Venezuela includes, as a fundamental element, a considerable increase in the income generated for the public sector, and more so, how can it be possible that the International Monetary Fund has recommended such increases?

Why, if the country had a positive trade balance which should have resulted in a stable currency, did we have to suffer through a mega-devaluation (which impoverishes the private sector and enriches the public sector) and how can it occur to anyone to call this “orthodox”?

In general terms, the last thing the economists would have recommended for a country submerged in a deep recession would be an increase in taxation. Why, then, have fiscal charges been increased in Venezuela, resulting in an even deeper recession and how can it occur to anyone to call this “orthodox”?

If there is a firm consensus, both inside Venezuela as well as internationally, that the future of the country is based fundamentally on a drastic reduction in the size of the public sector and that such policies have been applied by our self-proclaimed neoliberal planning ministers to whom they have become almost a religion, then why has the public sector grown in relation to the private sector, year after year after year?

Oil is, as is a Picasso painting, an easily liquidated asset. Why should we be so enchanted with the income created by the oil aperture if we have not yet been told what will be done with it and where it will be spent. A bit like selling your home without knowing beforehand where you will move to or what the cost of a new house will be.

For years we have accused the international banking community of deceiving us and having smothered us in devilish foreign debt. Why, then, are we now supposed to be pleased as punch that the foreign banks are again showing confidence in Venezuela and are going to increase lending in the country?

If after a few months of Agenda Venezuela, during which recession has deepened, the public sector has grown and no major inroads have been made on reforms corresponding to vital sectors such as the judiciary, health and education, then who does the International Monetary Fund work for when they congratulate the authorities on their performance and, in the same breath, insist on increasing gasoline prices?

We have always known that we are a society of rentiers based on our oil income, that while petroleum reserves last we will basically always be a society of rentiers and that most of our problems stem from the fact that we are simply inefficient rentiers. Why, then, do we insist on the search for an economic model based on the elimination of this society of rentiers instead of finding one that will insure that we become competent rentiers?

We know that the oil industry is not by itself a great employment generator. We also know that due to the overvalued exchange parity caused by this oil income it will always be difficult for labor intensive economic activities to remain competitive. Why do we insist on being so purist in the application of neoliberal policies, for example, in the establishment of toll charges for access to public parks, while we come close to fainting at the thought of offering a bit of support and protection to the greatest of our national parks called “agriculture”?

It would be easy for Dad to answer his children’s queries with a simple “go ask the economists” but then, what else can I, as an economist Dad, do?

Here a translation to spanish