The literacy scheme was one of a clutch of social “missions” organised by Mr Chávez in 2003, when he faced possible defeat in a recall referendum on his presidency. The government claims that by October 2005 it had all but eliminated illiteracy. That claim has become a centrepiece of the international propaganda effort on behalf of Mr Chávez's “revolution”. But there is no data to support it. Many educationalists doubt it. Even the government itself has retreated from its initial figure of “less than 1% illiteracy” to a figure of around 4%, though it is not clear whether this refers just to adults or to the total population.
It is notoriously difficult to obtain precise literacy figures from census data, which rely on self-assessment. But Francisco Rodríguez of Wesleyan University in Connecticut and Daniel Ortega of IESA, a Caracas business school, have used household surveys from the national statistical institute to assess the programme. In an article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, Mr Rodríguez says that they found “little evidence” of any “statistically distinguishable effect on Venezuelan illiteracy”. Where the government says it taught 1.5m, the study found that only 1.1m were illiterate to begin with, and that the fall over the 2003-05 period was less than 100,000. Even this improvement could largely be explained by a long-term demographic trend (many illiterate adults are elderly and die off).
Adán Chávez, who is the education minister as well as the president's brother, has complained of statistical “manipulation” by the government's foes. But Mr Rodríguez, for one, is no reactionary; he was the chief economist of Venezuela's National Assembly in 2000-04, and was once a chavista sympathiser.
Last year the statistics institute launched its own study on the impact of the social missions. This was supposed to be ready by January. But delays in buying equipment mean it has yet to start, according to Irene Gurrea, the economist in charge. Asked if there were any reliable statistics on the impact of Misión Robinson, Ms Gurrea said: “As far as we know, no—that's why we're doing the study.”
Staff of an older literacy programme run by Fe y Alegría, a Catholic charity, say they continue to enroll students. In Machiques, near the Colombian border, 100 joined in the past semester. They say that up to 40% of the Warao Indians in the Orinoco delta are illiterate. In 2005 Mr Chávez told local officials to declare their towns officially “illiteracy free”. Knowing this to be untrue, the mayor of Machiques resisted, but gave in to pressure, according to Jesús Vilorio, who works for Fe y Alegría.
It is not hard to find individuals like Ms Silva who say their lives were changed by Misión Robinson. But the missions have gone hand-in-hand with neglect of schools and hospitals. Mr Rodríguez estimates that Robinson spent $1,000 for each of its literate graduates, compared with around $60 for other literacy schemes in Latin America. At the least, that money could have been better spent.
Soon after joining the National Assembly, I clashed with the administration over underfunding of the Consolidated Social Fund (known by its Spanish acronym FUS), which had been created by Chávez to coordinate the distribution of resources to antipoverty programs. The law establishing the fund included a special provision to ensure that it would benefit from rising oil revenues. But when oil revenues started to go up, the Finance Ministry ignored the provision, allocating to the fund in the 2001 budget only $295 million -- 15 percent less than the previous year and less than a third of the legally mandated $1.1 billion. When my office pointed out this inconsistency, the Finance Ministry came up with the creative accounting gimmick of rearranging the law so that programs not coordinated by the FUS would nevertheless appear to be receiving resources from it. The effect was to direct resources away from the poor even as oil profits were surging. (Hard-liners in the government, incensed by my office's criticisms, immediately called for my ouster. When the last moderates, who understood the need for an independent research team to evaluate policies, left the Chávez camp in 2004, the government finally disbanded our office.)Rodriguez notes that income inequality has actually increased during Hugo's tenure:
One would expect such a consensus to be backed up by an impressive array of evidence. But in fact, there is remarkably little data supporting the claim that the Chávez administration has acted any differently from previous Venezuelan governments -- or, for that matter, from those of other developing and Latin American nations -- in redistributing the gains from economic growth to the poor. One oft-cited statistic is the decline in poverty from a peak of 54 percent at the height of the national strike in 2003 to 27.5 percent in the first half of 2007. Although this decline may appear impressive, it is also known that poverty reduction is strongly associated with economic growth and that Venezuela's per capita GDP grew by nearly 50 percent during the same time period -- thanks in great part to a tripling of oil prices. The real question is thus not whether poverty has fallen but whether the Chávez government has been particularly effective at converting this period of economic growth into poverty reduction. One way to evaluate this is by calculating the reduction in poverty for every percentage point increase in per capita income -- in economists' lingo, the income elasticity of poverty reduction. This calculation shows an average reduction of one percentage point in poverty for every percentage point in per capita GDP growth during this recovery, a ratio that compares unfavorably with those of many other developing countries, for which studies tend to put the figure at around two percentage points. Similarly, one would expect pro-poor growth to be accompanied by a marked decrease in income inequality. But according to the Venezuelan Central Bank, inequality has actually increased during the Chávez administration, with the Gini coefficient (a measure of economic inequality, with zero indicating perfect equality and one indicating perfect inequality) increasing from 0.44 to 0.48 between 2000 and 2005.In fact by almost every measure things have managed to get worse for many Venezuelans:
...official statistics show no signs of a substantial improvement in the well-being of ordinary Venezuelans, and in many cases there have been worrying deteriorations. The percentage of underweight babies, for example, increased from 8.4 percent to 9.1 percent between 1999 and 2006. During the same period, the percentage of households without access to running water rose from 7.2 percent to 9.4 percent, and the percentage of families living in dwellings with earthen floors multiplied almost threefold, from 2.5 percent to 6.8 percent.How about that largesse being diverted to the poor? Non-existent says Rodriguez, although he eschews raw numbers and goes by percentage of the budget:
Remarkably, given Chávez's rhetoric and reputation, official figures show no significant change in the priority given to social spending during his administration. The average share of the budget devoted to health, education, and housing under Chávez in his first eight years in office was 25.12 percent, essentially identical to the average share (25.08 percent) in the previous eight years. And it is lower today than it was in 1992, the last year in office of the "neoliberal" administration of Carlos Andrés Pérez -- the leader whom Chávez, then a lieutenant colonel in the Venezuelan army, tried to overthrow in a coup, purportedly on behalf of Venezuela's neglected poor majority.Health stats are also quite bleek:
In a number of recent studies, I have worked with colleagues to look more systematically at the results of Chávez's health and education misiones. Our findings confirm that Chávez has in fact done little for the poor. For example, his government often claims that the influx of Cuban doctors under the Barrio Adentro health program is responsible for a decline in infant mortality in Venezuela. In fact, a careful analysis of trends in infant and neonatal mortality shows that the rate of decline is not significantly different from that of the pre-Chávez period, nor from the rate of decline in other Latin American countries. Since 1999, the infant mortality rate in Venezuela has declined at an annual rate of 3.4 percent, essentially identical to the 3.3 percent rate at which it had declined during the previous nine-year period and lower than the rates of decline for the same period in Argentina (5.5 percent), Chile (5.3 percent), and Mexico (5.2 percent).Bills are coming due:
But by late 2007, Chávez's economic model had begun to unravel. For the first time since early 2004, a majority of voters claimed that both their personal situation and the country's situation had worsened during the preceding year. Scarcities in basic foodstuffs, such as milk, black beans, and sardines, were chronic, and the difference between the official and the black-market exchange rate reached 215 percent. When the Central Bank board received its November price report indicating that monthly inflation had risen to 4.4 percent (equivalent to an annual rate of 67.7 percent), it decided to delay publication of the report until after the vote on the constitutional reform was held.
This growing economic crisis is the predictable result of the gross mismanagement of the economy by Chávez's economic team. During the past five years, the Venezuelan government has pursued strongly expansionary fiscal and economic policies, increasing real spending by 137 percent and real liquidity by 218 percent. This splurge has outstripped even the expansion in oil revenues: the Chávez administration has managed the admirable feat of running a budget deficit in the midst of an oil boom.
A sensible solution to Venezuela's overexpansion would require reining in spending and the growth of the money supply. But such a solution is anathema to Chávez, who has repeatedly equated any call for spending reductions with neoliberal dogma. Instead, the government has tried to deal with inflation by expanding the supply of foreign currency to domestic firms and consumers and increasing government subsidies. The result is a highly distorted economy in which the government effectively subsidizes two-thirds of the cost of imports and foreign travel for the wealthy while the poor cannot find basic food items on store shelves. The astounding growth of imports, which have nearly tripled since 2002 (imports of such luxury items as Hummers and 15-year-old Scotch have grown even more dramatically), is now threatening to erase the nation's current account surplus.
