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With oil's cash, Venezuelans consume
By Jens Erik Gould
The New York Times
CARACAS
Petroleumworld.com 06 08 06
On a recent Sunday morning here, free-spending customers have emptied Vintage, a trendy upscale bar, of nearly all its best vodka. At the Castellana Chevrolet dealership nearby, buyers wait eight months to get the keys to cars they paid for long ago.
Shoppers at San Ignacio, a mall in eastern Caracas, reflect the effects of increased oil revenue and 9 percent economic growth. Naysayers warn that what high oil prices provide, inevitable low ones will take away.
And on a recent weekend at the LG Digital Store and at RCA Electronics in the Sambil mall, consumer confidence has helped strip the shelves of television sets and refrigerators."Even our construction workers are spending their whole paychecks as soon as they get paid," said Gerardo Pereira, 33, the owner of Vintage, who says he has never seen Venezuelans of all social classes spend this much.
With oil revenue flowing into its coffers, the government is spending like never before on social development programs that free up cash for the poor by providing free education and health care and cheap food. Wage increases and infrastructure projects also fill the economy with money that filters down to Venezuelans' pockets. As a result, consumers are buying more each year, helping Venezuela post growth that exceeded 9 percent last year and in the first quarter of 2006.
But economists here and abroad say that such rosy indicators are part of an artificial economic boom that could later hurt the country; the spending spree, they say, is masking the fundamental limitations of an economy propped up by spending, but failing to generate enough new private investment to sustain longer-term growth and job creation.
Michael Gavin, chief Latin American economist at UBS Warburg in Stamford, Conn., said, "They're hollowing out the economy and setting Venezuela up for a real setback if oil prices ever return to more historically normal levels."
President Hugo Chávez, who has shaped much of his domestic economic policy around the funneling of oil revenue into social programs, has tightened his reins on the private sector; he has forced foreign oil companies to change their contracts, expropriated private land considered idle and imposed labor laws.
Mr. Chávez has been emboldened by a sixfold increase in oil prices since he was elected in 1998. But for many investors, increased government controls and Mr. Chávez's brash moves against private business are clouding the outlook for operating in this country, one of the world's big oil exporters.
"That's very bad and inconvenient," Domingo Maza Zavala, a central bank director, said in an interview. "If this is the vision of our private investors, in a few years the Venezuelan economy will fall into a difficult situation because of productive inefficiency."
Mr. Maza says the government is making the same mistakes that Venezuelan governments made in the 1970's and 80's, when spending sprees in times of high oil prices were hard to curb once prices fell, leading to soaring national debt and economic downturns.
"We know the bonanza will come to an end," he said. "Unfortunately, I don't think the government is learning the lessons of the past."
Direct foreign investment nearly doubled last year, to $2.9 billion, from $1.5 billion in 2004, as the economy recuperated from a freefall that followed widespread antigovernment strikes in 2002.
But Venezuela attracted 30 percent less direct foreign investment in 2005 than it did, on an annual average, in the second half of the 1990's, a period when the oil industry opened to multinational companies, according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, which tracks economic performance.
Total private investment rose 3 percent from 2000 to 2004, according to the central bank. Mr. Gavin of UBS Warburg says Venezuela's private-sector performance is weak compared with that in other growing Latin American economies. Mexico, for instance, attracted twice as much private investment in relation to its total output last year than Venezuela did in 2004. The central bank has not published figures for 2005.
Mr. Maza told the National Assembly on Wednesday that private investment was now below 15 percent of output, the level he says is needed to maintain a growing economy. "This is one of the defects of the present growth," he said.
An influx of foreign goods holds back industries from expanding and creating jobs, said José Rojas, a former Chávez finance minister who is now an economic consultant. Imports, nearly a third of them from the United States, increased by 28 percent last year, reaching almost $25 billion, the government says.
Though the economy grew 9 percent in 2005, that growth produced a rise in the number of jobs just under 2 percent, according to the government's National Statistics Institute.
Yet public spending was up 40 percent in the first quarter of 2006, to $11 billion, according to the central bank. The planning and development minister, Jorge Giordani, expects the economy to grow as much as 7 percent this year, as the demand for goods has renewed investment in areas like telecommunications and commerce.
Middle-class Venezuelans seem happy to go along. "When I see someone with a new model of clothing, I have to buy it," said Judith Quintero, 29, who said she was spending more of her own money since sales at the Confetti children's clothing store she manages went up 40 percent last month. "My husband tells me I'm spending more than I'm making."
Companies are tight-lipped about their reluctance to invest because they do not want to upset the government and they are profiting now from the high consumption levels. Those levels nearly doubled in the first quarter, according to a market research firm, LatinSource.
"Businessmen are all very happy because they're making a lot," said Oscar García Mendoza, president of Banco Venezolano de Crédito. "But they don't want to invest at all."
While windfall oil profits have caused building booms in other oil-producing countries like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, Mr. García noted that he could see no construction cranes as he gazed at a wide view of downtown Caracas from his high-rise office.
President Chávez, a leftist who has become the Bush administration's most visible antagonist in Latin America, has discouraged much-needed investment by maintaining a strident discourse against capitalism while endorsing Venezuela's transformation to the "new socialism of the 21st century."
With the judiciary controlled by the government, many businessmen say they think there is little respect for contracts, according to Antonio Canova of the law firm of Bolinaga Levy Márquez & Canova in Caracas. Investors are also concerned for their personal safety, as frequent crime troubles Venezuelan cities and a recent series of kidnappings and murders have jolted the country.
Forty percent of industrial companies have closed since Mr. Chávez became president, most soon after he took office early in 1999, and the number of companies doing business has not recovered, the Venezuelan Confederation of Industry says. While the industrial sector foresees 10 percent growth this year, only one-tenth of companies are planning long-term investment like expanding their factories or building new ones, the group says.
Edmond Saade, president of the Venezuelan-American Chamber of Commerce, adds: "There are not really established rules and regulations to encourage the private sector. There are more to really control it and make its life more difficult."
Mr. Chávez has transferred foreign currency reserves and oil profits to a development fund, which Mr. Maza of the central bank estimates will reach $20 billion by the end of the year. That money finances a flurry of social development programs that are the hallmarks of the president's socialist "Bolivarian revolution."
Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning policy group in Washington, says these programs have helped raise living standards and workers' productivity among the poor. He noted that figures from the National Statistics Institute showed that poverty had fallen 7 percent since Mr. Chávez came to power.
Mr. Weisbrot disagrees with economists who foretell doom from the consumer-generated boom, saying that 11 percent first-quarter growth in industries other than oil is a more important gauge of the economy than investor confidence.
For now, at least, Venezuelans are spending like there is no tomorrow.
"People from every social status have money in their pockets," Mr. Pereira, the owner of the bar Vintage, said, collecting pricey bottles that patrons left behind half-full. "So everyone's consuming."
The New York Times 06 08 06
Copyright © 2006 New York Times. All Rights Reserved.
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