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In Venezuela, political opposition has a price
by Scott Gilbreath ~ April 30th, 2009
In 2002-2004, almost 5 million Venezuelans signed one or more in a series of three petitions calling for an election to remove President Hugo Chavez from office. After Chavez survived the recall vote of August 2004, the names of those who had signed the final petition were compiled into a database using software called Maisanta.
Now economic analysis has found evidence that petition signers paid a price in lost employment and wages. This tends to corroborate long-held suspicions that the Chavez government used the Maisanta database as an enemies list. The analysis also quantifies the loss to Venezuela’s economy due to the regime’s apparent indulgence of political vendettas.
This is the abstract posted at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The Price of Political Opposition: Evidence from Venezuela’s Maisanta
Chang-Tai Hsieh, Edward Miguel, Daniel Ortega, Francisco Rodriguez
In 2004, the Chávez regime in Venezuela distributed the list of several million voters whom had attempted to remove him from office throughout the government bureaucracy, allegedly to identify and punish these voters. We match the list of petition signers distributed by the government to household survey respondents to measure the economic effects of being identified as a Chavez political opponent. We find that voters who were identified as Chavez opponents experienced a 5 percent drop in earnings and a 1.5 percentage point drop in employment rates after the voter list was released. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the loss aggregate TFP [total factor productivity] from the misallocation of workers across jobs was substantial, on the order of 3 percent of GDP.
One of the four authors, Daniel Ortega, is associated with an academic institution in Caracas, Venezuela. The other three have posts at American universities.
The full text of the paper can be purchased online for US$5.
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May 3rd, 2009 at 02:25 PM
[...] NSCOTT– In Venezuela, political opposition has a price …. [...]
May 5th, 2009 at 03:02 PM
[...] Venezuela: In Venezuela, political opposition has a price. In 2002-2004, almost 5 million Venezuelans signed one or more in a series of three petitions calling for an election to remove President Hugo Chavez from office. After Chavez survived the recall vote of August 2004, the names of those who had signed the final petition were compiled into a database using software called Maisanta. [...]