In terms of economic recession, Venezuela has proven to be worse than what Nigeria experienced in 2016, indeed worse than what any economy ever went through.
The Latin American country’s economy shrank a massive 16.5 per cent in 2016, according to an official government filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
About the same time, Nigeria’s economy shrank between 1.5 to 2 per cent in figures published by the National Bureau of Statistics and the World Bank.
Venezuela, an oil-rich but impoverished country attributed the collapse to a contraction of 9.9 per cent in the oil sector and 16.1 per cent in the non-oil economy, the same factor that caused Nigeria’s recession, while it lasted.
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The 150-page report, received on Thursday by the SEC, also reported inflation at 274.4 per cent, and an unemployment rate of 7.5 per cent in the calendar year ending on December 31, 2016.
And it revealed a sharp drop in Venezuelan imports in 2016, when purchases totalled $16.4 billion, half of the $33.3 billion of the previous year.
“Since 2015, there has been increasing political and social unrest due to shortages of basic consumer goods as a result of a drop in domestic food production; limited access to imports as a result of currency restrictions; smuggling; hoarding and other distribution problems,” the report noted.
It also classed 11.3 per cent of the population as “extremely poor” in 2014, the last year the figures were available, up from 7.1 per cent in 2012.
The SEC requires detailed economic filings from foreign governments that issue their debt in the US.
Venezuela is going through an acute economic crisis that intensified in 2014 with the fall in oil prices, the source of 96 per cent of its export revenue.
There is a major shortage of food and medicines and a hyper-inflationary spiral that, according to analysts, will exceed 2,000 per cent in 2017.
