logo oil company PDVSA (AFP / File / Juan Barreto)
impossible for Venezuelans to find many necessities hides another reality: the dire situation many public enterprises, paralyzed by low productivity and lack of finances.
Main public group Venezuelan oil company PDVSA is a perfect example with a productivity per employee divided by three to 15 years “chavismo.”
En’99, date of the accession to power of the late President Hugo Chavez, it had nearly 51,000 employees, with a production of 63 barrels per employee per day.
Today it employs 140,000 people … but each of them produces only 20 barrels per day.
And even if it is based on the largest reserves of oil in the world, she accumulated debt in 2013 to 16 billion euros to suppliers.
As for the steel mill Sidor, the largest in Latin America, six years after it was expropriated group Argentine Techint order of Hugo Chavez (who died in 2013), its production is more than a third of what it was then, according to Jose Luis Hernandez, president of the Union of Workers in the steel industry (SUTISS.)
“We lost resources due to bureaucracy and corruption,” he says.
“In 2008 (the government) had approved more than 1 2 billion to straighten Sidor, and five years later it had received only 20% of this amount, “he said.
hard for the company to look to the future so that it can not raise its production, mainly because “the lack of investment, raw materials and spare parts for machines” or “the deterioration of relations with suppliers – to whom we owe 920 million dollars. “
For because of strict exchange controls introduced in 2003, companies need to ask the government the necessary dollars to finance imports of goods and essential to the production room … . often unsuccessfully
– Fever of expropriations –
In everyday life, this translates into a tremendous shortage for Venezuelans: deodorant coffins through the bottle caps plastic, flour or drugs, a staple in four is found, amid troubling economic crisis with annual inflation of 60%.
The nationalization of enterprises have exacerbated this phenomenon.
Nicolas Maduro July 20, 2014 in Caracas (AFP / File / Leo Ramirez)
Between 2002 and June 2014, the Venezuelan government expropriated 1,288 companies, according to the count Conindustria established by the association of firms.
Out of 30 million people, the country now has 2.6 million public employees, 5.4 million in private.
Initially, these expropriations are rather a “commendable” gesture, for the “benefit of the community”, as the generous subsidies on prices of many products, says Luis Vicente Leon, the firm market research Datanalisis.
But they had “a dramatic impact on productivity and supply capacity” of these companies, he says, removing any particular motivator for staff .
“The central government policies over the last 15 years have been oriented + Socialism of the 21st century ‘,” a model used by Hugo Chavez and his successors Nicolas Maduro said Anabella Abadi economist consulting firm ODH Grupo Consultor.
Among its guidelines, she explains, “moving towards the political hegemony of the ruling party, the rejection of private property and development up a central planning in control of the economy. “
” Each expropriation, each compulsory redemption of a business or creating a new production socialist is a step towards the establishment this new model, “she notes.
But overall, the program is” the same as that of socialism in the 20th century. “
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