POVERTY AND JOBLESSNESS IN THE BRV

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 04 CARACAS 001031 SIPDIS SENSITIVE SIPDIS TREASURY FOR KLINGENSMITH AND NGRANT COMMERCE FOR 4431/MAC/WH/MCAMERON NSC FOR DTOMLINSON HQ SOUTHCOM ALSO FOR POLAD E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: ECON EFIN SOCI VE SUBJECT: POVERTY AND JOBLESSNESS IN THE BRV REF: 05 CARACAS 3830 This message is sensitive, but unclassified. Please treat accordingly. -------------- SUMMARY -------------- ¶1. (SBU) BRV data indicates that poverty and unemployment are lower today than they were in 1999 when Chavez came to power. The oil windfall and attendant massive government expenditures and transfers makes this a plausible contention. However, the BRV's National Statistics Institute (INE) seems determined to make things look better than they are by manipulating methodologies (for example by counting anyone participating in a "mission" or employed more than four hours a week as fully employed). According to INE, poverty fell from 50 percent of the population in 1999 to 30.4 percent as of the end of 2006. Official statistics combine opaque methodology with rosy assumptions to keep the poverty line low. Similarly, according to INE unemployment fell from 15.3 percent in 1999 to 8.8 percent as of the end of April 2007. Yet, every year over 400,000 Venezuelans enter the labor market to compete for fewer than 190,000 jobs created. BRV social expenditures, especially via the missions, work to lower unemployment by removing people from the active labor force and decrease poverty by providing handouts that increase household incomes. While these programs have benefited many Venezuelans, their sustainability is highly questionable. -------------- DEFINING POVERTY -------------- ¶2. (SBU) The National Statistics Institute (INE) breaks the population into three groups: households, poor households, and poor households in extreme poverty. Poor households have incomes below the cost of the basic basket of goods and services set by the BRV (which includes food, educational services, health care, etc.),and households in extreme poverty have incomes insufficient to purchase the basic food basket. As of April 2007, the basic monthly basket of goods and services cost USD 452 at the official exchange rate and the basic food basket cost USD 226 at the official exchange rate. While INE has removed the poverty statistics from its website, according to comments made by its president, Elias Eljuri, on May 15, as of the end of 2006, 30.4 percent of the population was poor, including 9.1 percent of the population living in extreme poverty. This announcement, unsurprisingly, marks a huge decrease during the second half of 2006. As of the end of June, 2006 INE reported that poverty was 37 percent, including those in extreme poverty, who made up 15.1 percent of the population. ¶3. (SBU) INE's poverty statistics are widely questioned, especially since 2004 when INE changed its methodology following criticisms by Chavez that INE did not accurately account for non-monetary value of the BRV's social programs (reftel). Since adding a generous calculation of the effect of the "missions," which provide free medical care, educational programs, subsidized food, and a variety of other handouts, the official poverty rate has fallen significantly. INE has never publicly released its current methodology. Between 2004 and 2005, INE claims that poverty decreased from 53.9 percent of households to 43.7 percent, a highly questionable decline given the almost nonexistent poverty reduction during the five years previous (reftel). Since that time, official poverty numbers have continued to fall, such that according to INE figures, poverty now appears to have fallen by over twenty percentage points since Chavez came to power in 1999. ¶4. (SBU) According to researchers at Andres Bello Catholic University (UCAB),INE's poverty numbers appear low as compared to other estimates because of their calculation of the basic baskets. According to poverty expert Professor Matias Riutort (PROTECT THROUGHOUT),UCAB's poverty numbers show the same trends as INE's, only they tend to be around 8-10 percentage points higher, with poverty falling from 56 percent of the population in 1999 to 47.8 percent at the end of June, 2006. INE's baskets contain many price-controlled CARACAS 00001031 002 OF 004 goods, which are often unavailable or sold at prices in excess of the regulated amount. The basic food basket, for example contains 50 products, of which 27 are under price controls. Given that many goods sell above their regulated price, or are unavailable due to shortages and thus must be substituted for more expensive unregulated goods, the actual cost of purchasing the basket is higher than INE estimates. INE's poverty line is therefore lower because some households are categorized as able to buy goods that, in the real marketplace, they cannot afford. ¶5. (SBU) The polling and market survey firm Datanalisis divides Venezuela into five socioeconomic status (SES) groups: A, B, C, D, and E, with A being the best off. These groups are defined by income, education, type of housing, and geographic residency, with households of classes A and B (3 percent of the population) earning at least USD 4,000 a month, C (16 percent) earning an average of USD 900 a month, D (38 percent) averaging USD 415 a month, and E (43 percent) averaging USD 238 a month (all at the overvalued official exchange rate). According to Datanlisis, as much as 80 percent of the population falls in the D and E social classes. Incomes have risen for the D and E social classes in recent years, however increases in income have not translated into poverty alleviation due to the structural causes of poverty (poor education, weak family structures, and inadequate housing, for example). In other words, even though a household's income may have increased, by still living in a single-parent household with an eighth grade education, in a slum with no sanitation, they remain decidedly poor. -------------- CAUSE -------------- ¶6. (SBU) Poverty is a long term problem in Venezuela that stems from the series of boom and bust cycles that Venezuela has experienced during the past four decades. Coupled with underinvestment, a population that has tended to grow faster than the economy, the population's move from the countryside to the cities (today Venezuela's population is 90 percent urban),rampant inflation that has virtually eliminated Venezuelans' abilities to save during the past two decades, and a variety of other structural factors, poverty has become an accepted norm in Venezuelan society. The ever-expanding "barrio" ghettos surrounding and pouring into Caracas are a relatively recent phenomenon. They are the result of the massive movement of people to the cities during the oil-boom 1970s coupled with the massive unemployment and poverty that accompanied the country's busts and long-term decline in the 1980s and 1990s. ¶7. (SBU) While Venezuela made great strides expanding educational opportunities to its populace in the 1970s, returns on investment in education faltered in the late 1980s and 1990s as spending declined and the inefficiencies of secondary and tertiary systems became evident. Chavez has heavily increased government spending on education, which has risen by almost 200 percent in dollar terms since 1999 (not including expenditures on many of the educational missions). Yet today there is actually a shortage of skilled workers in Venezuela, from construction workers to IT professionals. Venezuelans lack necessary job skills to take advantage of job offers and many do not even bother, preferring to sit at home or sell informally, satiated by government handouts. ¶8. (SBU) At the same time private companies are discouraged from investing in Venezuela due to the uncertain political climate. While most factories are running at near full capacity to meet the oil-fueled consumption boom, few are increasing production or hiring new workers. According to one of Venezuela's chambers of commerce, at least 6,000 industrial firms have been shuttered since Chavez came to power. Venezuelan labor regulations are incredibly difficult to fulfill, with one supermarket chain owner telling econoff that it was literally impossible for him to fully comply with all of the laws and regulations as many are contradictory. In the most recent "Doing Business" report by the World Bank, Venezuela is tied for last place in the hemisphere in both the difficulty of hiring an employee and of firing one. Venezuela is estimated to have one of the highest costs of labor in South America. In addition, it has been illegal to CARACAS 00001031 003 OF 004 fire anyone making less than USD 857/month for the past two years and the firing freeze was recently extended for another nine months. -------------- UNEMPLOYMENT BY NUMBERS -------------- ¶9. (SBU) Approximately 45 percent of Venezuelans work in the informal sector, without job security, health care, or the other benefits that accrue to salaried employees. Annually, around 400,000 people enter the labor force, for which there were 190,000 new jobs in 2006. INE recently announced that the unemployment rate fell to 8.8 percent in April. This is misleadingly low. At the end of April, there were 18,916,608 potentially active adults (adults over 15 years of age),of which 12,490,165 were in the active labor force. Venezuela currently has a little over 27 million inhabitants. ¶10. (SBU) INE considers anyone working at least four hours a week as well as the participants of many of the missions as "employed." Analysts at the local economic consulting firm EconAnalitica estimate that over 750,000 unemployed people are considered "employed" due to their participation in a BRV mission, and an additional 500,000 "employed" Venezuelans are working less than 15 hours a week and therefore would not be considered employed, for example, by the U.S. Census Bureau. ¶11. (SBU) The largest drop in the unemployment rate, though, is due to the increase in the number of inactive workers. Participants of the BRV's educational missions, who often go to school as little as 4 hours a week, are considered students, and thus removed from the labor force. If one includes the increase in inactives above the average for the past 10 years as unemployed, it implies an unemployment rate in Venezuela in excess of 13 percent at the end of 2006. ¶12. (SBU) The employment situation is also affected by an increase in public sector jobs and a decrease in private sector jobs, as government spending increases and private firms reduce hiring. 16.8 percent of the labor force at the beginning of 1997 was in the public sector. This ratio fell to a low of 14 percent in the second semester of 2003, as oil prices declined and reforms cut back bloated bureaucracy. The percentage has since grown, with the public sector now representing 16.9 percent of the labor force (high for recent years, though below the historical high of almost 23 percent set in 1983). Coupled with the 45.4 percent of the labor force that, according to INE, is employed informally, this leaves only 37.7 percent of the population engaged in formal private sector work. As Riutort explains it, only 37.7 percent of the population is productively supporting the rest of the country. The petroleum industry, which provides 90 percent of the country's exports and over 50 percent of government revenues, employees less than one percent of the country's workers. ¶13. (SBU) In addition, the number of people considered disabled or unable to work has grown considerably since 1999. During the past seven years, the labor force grew by 21 percent and the number of disabled people almost doubled to over 1 million (or 5.5 percent of the labor force),implying the perverse incentive (hardly limited to Venezuela) for people to collect disability payments instead of seeking gainful employment. -------------- COMMENT -------------- ¶14. (SBU) While it would appear that the percentage of people technically unemployed has fallen, the number of people with actual jobs seems to not have grown in tandem with the economy, which grew at 10.3 percent in both 2005 and 2006. The reductions in poverty and unemployment numbers are both indicative of the massive government spending that has occurred in recent years thanks to windfall oil revenues, and of creative interpretations of those statistics by the BRV. The increasing politicization of statistics in Venezuela will make it more difficult to get an accurate picture of the Venezuelan economy. INE and the Central Bank are currently devising a new methodology to measure inflation that many expect will demonstrate lower inflation than the current CARACAS 00001031 004 OF 004 system. ¶15. (SBU) The hallmark of Chavez' Bolivarian Revolution, the missions serve dual purposes for combating unemployment and poverty. First, they provide handouts that raise peoples' incomes above the poverty line and second, they remove people from the labor pool, thus lowering the unemployment number. A discussion of the BRV's missions requires an explanation of opportunity cost. The money could arguably be spent in such a way to help many more people in an even more significant manner. The BRV's literacy programs, for example, cost USD 583 per student at the official rate and have had very little effect on reducing illiteracy. By paying both teachers and students to participate, however, they provide a benefit to these individuals in the form of supplemental income. According to UNESCO, the average cost of a literacy program in Latin America was USD 61 per pupil in 2005 -- about one-tenth of BRV spending. ¶16. (SBU) There is little evidence that these programs treat the causes of poverty and unemployment rather than the symptoms. By proverbially giving out fish instead of teaching those to fish, and at the same time seemingly committed to destroying the boats and nets, the BRV is only temporarily alleviating problems that, as has been the case during the country's previous oil booms, will come back to haunt successor governments when the price of oil falls and the BRV cannot sustain its handout programs. BROWNFIELD