Sunday 30 May 2010

Bolivarian lies

The Venezuelan National Institute of Statistics, INE, is completely dependent on the Venezuela regime, so if you want to consider any piece of information from its site, you have to take into account the statistics are mostly concocted to put Hugo Chávez's government under a favourable light.

Here I plotted the average OPEC oil price per year ($ per barrel) from 1998 to 2009. I also draw on the same chart the percentage of "poor" and "extreme poor" as percentage of Venezuela's population according to the INE. I am not normalizing the figures, but still you can get an idea about what is going on.
























It is basic: crumbles to the poor at best.

The percentages come from an article published by the INE to praise the government.

In the same article the INE tries to compare unemployment in Venezuela with unemployment in many other countries. In theory unemployment in Venezuela is lower than in Spain or Greece or even lower than the average in the EU as a whole. In reality you just need to read between the lines to realise: about half of the people the INE claims to be "employed" are street vendors (who anyway do not have unemployment money) and the like. I will get into detail in future posts about this "and the like" group.

If you speak Spanish, you can read some news about what kind of "jobs" Venezuelans have here, here.

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