Blog posts tagged by tag: Venezuela

• Venezuela's Electoral Conundrum

  by Francisco Rodríguez, Chief Economist at Torino Capital LLC

  Most parties in Venezuela’s main opposition coalition, the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), have decided to sit out the country’s May elections, according to public statements issued by some of the parties as well as the announcement made by MUD spokesperson Angel Oropeza on February 21, in which he said that they could not participate in a “fraudulent, illegitimate” presidential election unless electoral conditions change. [1]

  Although Oropeza said that all parties that are part of the MUD signed the statement, more moderate sectors of the opposition appear likely to participate.  At the present moment, the most probable scenario appears to be one in which President Nicolás Maduro will face an independent candidate supported by some minority parties, with the MUD calling on its supporters to abstain in the elections.

  In this scenario, President Maduro will be facing an opposition field that will be split between abstentionists and those favoring participation. This is certainly one of the most favorable settings that the government could have hoped for and raises the possibility that Maduro could be re-elected for a second six-year term without overtly manipulating the vote count. On the other hand, we argue that given the results of recent opinion polls, there is also a significant probability that Maduro could lose the election on these terms. 

  In this discussion, we begin by exploring the rationale for the decisions taken by key actors and then go on to map the potential scenarios that could arise from the electoral results.

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  Tags: Latin America, Venezuela

• 5 updates on the Venezuelan economic crisis

  It has been a few weeks since our last Venezuelan economy update and economist Jean-Philippe Pourcelot has a new post discussing five updates on the Venezuelan economy including the bolivar's latest plunge, the results of the bond swap saga, Venezuelan oil prices, and the government's newest plans to tackle soaring inflation.

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  Tags: Inflation, Latin America, Venezuela

• There's no end in sight to the Venezuela crisis

  Venezuela, as a country, has seen better days. The economy is in particular disarray. As a result, in our latest LatinFocus Consensus Forecast report for Venezuela, we project the economy contracting 9.7% in 2016.

  The crisis doesn’t look like it will be ending any time soon. Along with the disaster that is the economy, political turmoil, which stems largely from the economic crisis, has caused much uproar among the masses and has left President Nicolás Maduro’s government scrambling to keep its stranglehold on power. 

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  Tags: Economic Growth (GDP), Inflation, oil prices, Venezuela

• [INFOGRAPHIC] Latin America continues economic downslide as Argentina, Brazil & Venezuela confront internal crises

  Latin America’s  growth will be even lower this year than 2014’s lackluster estimate. In fact, our panel of analysts slashed their projections on weaker economic activity in key regional players.

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  Tags: Argentina, Brazil, Commodities, Infographic, Latin America, Venezuela