This book advances the theory that a potential leading export sector—in this case, the oil sector—is capable of inducing economic growth even in peripheral countries where the product line is primary in nature. In Venezuela the oil sector has contributed directly and indirectly to the development of the country's overall economy, particularly from 1936 to 1973, when that sector met the criteria of a leading sector, i.e., one that expands rapidly and obtains a large specific size relative to the economy as a whole. Oil investment in Venezuela contributed to the fiscal sector, the foreign sector, GDP, income, backward and forward linkages, the multiplier and accelerator effects, and the retained value of total expenditures. In spite of recent efforts to diversify the production and export mix, the Venezuelan economy continues to remain heavily dependent on oil production for export. During the midcentury decades of solid growth, it became evident that government oversight was needed to ensure that the numerous contributions flowing from the oil sector would be put to good use. Overall, it appears that the contributions were well utilized by the Venezuelan government, although there was plenty of room for improvement. Income distribution problems and other social inequities continued to beset the development process, leaving the economy rigid and inflexible. Consequently, when the oil sector faltered (1974 to 2000), Venezuela was unable to shift into other product lines. Political disarray soon followed, and with it a pervasive aura of economic uncertainty that persists to this day.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Venezuela had one of the poorest economies in Latin America, but by 1970 it had become the richest country in the region and one of the twenty richest countries in the world, ahead of countries such as Greece, Israel, and Spain. Between 1978 and 2001, however, Venezuela’s economy went sharply in reverse, with non-oil GDP declining by almost 19 percent and oil GDP by an astonishing 65 percent. What accounts for this drastic turnabout? The editors of Venezuela Before Chávez, who each played a policymaking role in the country’s economy during the past two decades, have brought together a group of economists and political scientists to examine systematically the impact of a wide range of factors affecting the economy’s collapse, from the cost of labor regulation and the development of financial markets to the weakening of democratic governance and the politics of decisions about industrial policy. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Omar Bello, Adriana Bermúdez, Matías Braun, Javier Corrales, Jonathan Di John, Rafael Di Tella, Javier Donna, Samuel Freije, Dan Levy, Robert MacCulloch, Osmel Manzano, Francisco Monaldi, María Antonia Moreno, Daniel Ortega, Michael Penfold, José Pineda, Lant Pritchett, Cameron A. Shelton, and Dean Yang.

This book advances the theory that a potential leading export sector—in this case, the oil sector—is capable of inducing economic growth even in peripheral countries where the product line is primary in nature. In Venezuela the oil sector has contributed directly and indirectly to the development of the country's overall economy, particularly from 1936 to 1973, when that sector met the criteria of a leading sector, i.e., one that expands rapidly and obtains a large specific size relative to the economy as a whole. Oil investment in Venezuela contributed to the fiscal sector, the foreign sector, GDP, income, backward and forward linkages, the multiplier and accelerator effects, and the retained value of total expenditures. In spite of recent efforts to diversify the production and export mix, the Venezuelan economy continues to remain heavily dependent on oil production for export. During the midcentury decades of solid growth, it became evident that government oversight was needed to ensure that the numerous contributions flowing from the oil sector would be put to good use. Overall, it appears that the contributions were well utilized by the Venezuelan government, although there was plenty of room for improvement. Income distribution problems and other social inequities continued to beset the development process, leaving the economy rigid and inflexible. Consequently, when the oil sector faltered (1974 to 2000), Venezuela was unable to shift into other product lines. Political disarray soon followed, and with it a pervasive aura of economic uncertainty that persists to this day.

For review see: Juan Carlos Boué, in Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 27, prt. 3 (October 1995); p. 739.

Since the discovery of abundant oil resources in the 1920s, Venezuela has had an economically privileged position among the nations of Latin America, which has led to its being treated by economic and political analysts as an exceptional case. In her well-known study of Venezuela’s political economy, The Paradox of Plenty (1997), Stanford political scientist Terry Karl argued that this oil wealth induced extraordinary corruption, rent-seeking, and centralized intervention that resulted in restricting productivity and growth. What this and other studies of Venezuela’s economy fail to explain, however, is how such conditions have accompanied both growth and stagnation at different periods of Venezuela’s history and why countries experiencing similar levels of corruption and rent-seeking produce divergent developmental outcomes. By investigating the record of economic development in Venezuela from 1920 to the present, Jonathan Di John shows that the key to explaining why the economy performed much better between 1920 and 1980 than in the post-1980 period is to understand how political strategies interacted with economic strategies—specifically, how politics determined state capacity at any given time and how the stage of development and development strategies affected the nature of political conflicts. In emphasizing the importance of an approach that looks at the political economy, not just at the economy alone, Di John advances the field methodologically while he contributes to a long-needed history of Venezuela’s economic performance in the twentieth century.

The most comprehensive history of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and of its members, this study takes the reader from the formation of the first petrostate in the world, Venezuela, in the late 1920s, to the global ascent of petrostates and OPEC during the 1970s, to their crisis in the late-1980s and early- 1990s.

Beneath Venezuelan soil lies an ocean of crude—the world’s largest reserves—an oil patch that shaped the nature of the global energy business. Unfortunately, a dysfunctional anti-American, leftist government controls this vast resource and has used its wealth to foster voter support, ultimately wreaking economic havoc. Crude Nation reveals the ways in which this mismanagement has led to Venezuela’s economic ruin and turned the country into a cautionary tale for the world. Raúl Gallegos, a former Caracas-based oil correspondent, paints a picture both vivid and analytical of the country’s economic decline, the government’s foolhardy economic policies, and the wrecked lives of Venezuelans. Without transparency, the Venezuelan government uses oil money to subsidize life for its citizens in myriad unsustainable ways, while regulating nearly every aspect of day-to-day existence in Venezuela. This has created a paradox in which citizens can fill up the tanks of their SUVs for less than one American dollar while simultaneously enduring nationwide shortages of staples such as milk, sugar, and toilet paper. Gallegos’s insightful analysis shows how mismanagement has ruined Venezuela again and again over the past century and lays out how Venezuelans can begin to fix their country, a nation that can play an important role in the global energy industry. This paperback edition features a new introduction by the author.