Putting to rest a scholar's dubious claim about economic inequality in Venezuela
Francisco Rodriguez, a Venezuelan economist at Wesleyan University, speaks at Dartmouth in May. By Justin Delacour
Latin America News Review
November 16, 2008
Last Spring, I attended a talk at the University of New Mexico in which Francisco Rodriguez, a Venezuelan economist at Wesleyan University, made the dubious claim that economic inequality in Venezuela had worsened during the left-populist presidency of Hugo Chavez. Rodriguez had made the same questionable claim in an article in the March/April 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs. In what can only be described as a basic ethical breach for a scholar of economics, Rodriguez misleadingly cherry-picked a 2005 Gini coefficient figure at a time when he could hardly have been unaware that Gini coefficient data for the country had been updated through 2007. (The Gini coefficient is a standard measure of economic inequality).
As the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) promptly pointed out, Rodriguez's claim was "wrong" and "the only consistent measure of the Gini coefficient (see Table 1) shows a substantial decline from 48.7 in 1998, or alternatively from 48.1 in 2003, to 42 in 2007."
Now, with the release of Latinobarómetro's 2008 polling data, Rodriguez's dubious claim appears even more dishonest.
When asked the question of whether social inequalities had "increased, remained the same, or decreased since democracy arrived," Venezuelan respondents were more likely than those of any other country in Latin America to say that their country's social inequalities had decreased (see page 98 of the Latinobarómetro report).
posted by Justin Delacour | 2:21 PM
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You will recall at UNM Rodriguez strove to broadly dismiss progress achieved through educational expenditures by showing the supposed expensive failure of the mass literacy campaign. But he did not touch on the expansion of university access and the other educational missions. The literacy campaign served as a straw man supposedly representative of all education expenditures.
Also, his dismissal of health care gains (measured by infant mortality rates) did not take into account that newly introducing widely available access to clinics often brings with it better measurement that sometimes shows higher infant mortality rates simply because previously higher rates were not recorded well by a previously skeletal system. Public health experts at the talk called Rodriguez out on this.
Another prong of Rodriguez's argument centered around diminished civil liberties, or a loss of democracy, in that people were blacklisted for helping a disloyal opposition. I recall Mr. Delacour made a valid counterargument about how the list was a fairly minor and proportional response to the coup and oil strike. But I will let him make that case in his own words.
Overall I found Rodriguez less than convincing in saying Chavez's budgets gave similar proportions of expenditures to social investment as did the 4th Republic's budgets. Under Chavez, the state intervention is much larger, so a similar proportion would be vastly more money. Rodriguez happily glossed over this distinction.
The adviser sums up the problems with Rodriguez's presentation better than I have.
Hey, if the adviser is who I think he is, I'd like to turn you on to a book that I think you would love. The Twenty Years Crisis by Edward Hallett Carr is a hidden treasure. It's been in publication since 1939 (!), which quite possibly makes it the seminal work on international relations, but it's been excluded from graduate seminars in the United States because it sheds too much light on how the ideologies of political scientists come into being.
Believe me when I tell you that you'd love this book.
As Oil Wars points out in his fine blog on Venezuela, we are starting to finally see some movement in that arena - though deathly slow. You may be interested in his blog at
http://oilwars.blogspot.com/2005/12/public-housing-venezuelan-style.html
Glad to see Oil Wars back at it again.
Are you suggesting that polls of perceptions about inequality are the same as actual data on income distribution? Wow.
Are you suggesting that polls of perceptions about inequality are the same as actual data on income distribution?
Try working on your reading comprehension, Miguel. As I already clarified, the hard data --CEPR's table on Venezuela's Gini coefficients-- quite clearly demonstrates that Rodriguez misrepresented the data and that economic inequality has declined in Venezuela. The Latinobarometro poll is just more icing on the cake.
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