Economy & Business - September-October 2012 (ISSN 1741-7430)

“Alice in Wonderland stuff”, was the succinct reaction of the director of the consultancy firm Econométrica and economics professor of the Universidad Central de Venezuela, Ángel García, to the 2013 budget presented to the national assembly in mid November by the planning and finance minister, Jorge Giordani, an avowed Marxist. Giordani himself described the budget as helping to “realise (Venezuela’s) transition to a socialist country”.

García accused the authorities of inhabiting “a parallel world with no relation to reality”. The fact is, however, that the budget presentation has, for some time now, been an annual exercise in futility which attracts increasingly less press attention because it is based upon a set of figures and assumptions that even the government of President Hugo Chávez does not actually believe – principally an average oil price of half the actual oil price.