Francisco Rodriguez, a Venezuelan economist at Wesleyan University, speaks at Dartmouth in May. By Justin Delacour
Latin America News Review
November 16, 2008
Last Spring, I attended a talk at the University of New Mexico in which Francisco Rodriguez, a Venezuelan economist at Wesleyan University, made the dubious claim that economic inequality in Venezuela had worsened during the left-populist presidency of Hugo Chavez. Rodriguez had made the same questionable claim in an article in the March/April 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs. In what can only be described as a basic ethical breach for a scholar of economics, Rodriguez misleadingly cherry-picked a 2005 Gini coefficient figure at a time when he could hardly have been unaware that Gini coefficient data for the country had been updated through 2007. (The Gini coefficient is a standard measure of economic inequality).
As the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) promptly pointed out, Rodriguez's claim was "wrong" and "the only consistent measure of the Gini coefficient (see Table 1) shows a substantial decline from 48.7 in 1998, or alternatively from 48.1 in 2003, to 42 in 2007."
Now, with the release of Latinobarómetro's 2008 polling data, Rodriguez's dubious claim appears even more dishonest.
When asked the question of whether social inequalities had "increased, remained the same, or decreased since democracy arrived," Venezuelan respondents were more likely than those of any other country in Latin America to say that their country's social inequalities had decreased (see page 98 of the Latinobarómetro report).
