Author Archives: Francisco R. Rodríguez

Opinión de la Corte de Delaware en caso Citgo

El 23 de marzo de 2023, el Juez Leonard Stark de la Corte Distrital de Delaware emitió una orden determinando que el Gobierno Interino de Venezuela encabezado por Juan Guaidó había ejercido control extensivo sobre PDVSA, lo que permitía que los acreedores de Venezuela ejerciesen acciones de embargo sobre las acciones de la casa matrizContinue reading “Opinión de la Corte de Delaware en caso Citgo”

How Clientelism Works: Evidence from the Barinas Special Election

Do politicians target the benefits of social programs to party loyalists or to swing voters? Traditional tests of this question are clouded by an identification problem caused by the simultaneity of politician and voter choices to participate in the exchange of assistance for votes. I use the holding of an unanticipated repeat gubernatorial election inContinue reading “How Clientelism Works: Evidence from the Barinas Special Election”

Quantifying Venezuela’s Destructive Conflict

How much have sanctions, and other politically induced restrictions on economic activity, affected the Venezuelan economy?  How much of the country’s decline can be attributed to these causes, as opposed to the more standard causes of poor policies and external shocks?  In this paper I offer a quantification of the effect of alternative causes. The bottom line is that around half of the country’s economic contraction between 2012 and 2020 can be explained as a result of sanctions and other politically induced restrictions such as the withdrawal of government recognition.

Revisiting the opposition’s debt restructuring guidelines

On July 3, 2019, the opposition-appointed Office of the Special Attorney General of Venezuela published a document outlining the principles for the country’s eventual debt restructuring. On March 23, 2023, Delaware District Court Judge Leonard Stark cited this document as proof of the lack of appropriate separation between the management of the country’s oil industryContinue reading “Revisiting the opposition’s debt restructuring guidelines”

¿Quién se beneficia de la licencia a Chevron de la OFAC?

En los últimos días, el gobierno estadounidense autorizó a Chevron Corporation vender petróleo venezolano en los mercados de EEUU, pero le prohibió realizar pagos de impuestos y regalías al gobierno venezolano. Argumentamos que la restricción de estos pagos es simbólica porque los pasivos fiscales no recaen en Chevron, sino en las empresas mixtas en las que Chevron es un socio minoritario y cuyas decisiones no puede controlar. Además, mostramos que mientras la recuperación del acceso a los mercados estadounidenses permita a las empresas mixtas de Chevron aumentar los niveles de producción, el gobierno de Maduro recibirá flujos adicionales de divisas que puede utilizar a voluntad. Este resultado se mantiene independientemente de si el incremento de los ingresos se utiliza para reducir los atrasos de la deuda de PDVSA con Chevron.

Who Benefits from OFAC’s Chevron License?

In recent days, the US government authorized Chevron Corporation to resell Venezuelan oil in US markets but barred it from making tax and royalty payments to the Venezuelan state. We argue that the restriction on these payments is symbolic because fiscal liabilities are incurred not by Chevron but by the joint ventures in which Chevron is a minority partner and whose decisions it is unable to control. Furthermore, we show that as long as regaining access to US markets enables Chevron joint ventures to increase production levels, the Maduro government will receive additional hard currency revenue flows which it can use at will. This result holds regardless of whether incremental revenues are used to reduce PDVSA’s debt arrears with Chevron.

Political Growth Collapses

We argue that economic collapses can result from the adoption by political actors of strategies that generate severe negative economic externalities for society. We establish the conditions for political conflict to become economically destructive and develop a diagnostics toolkit to identifywhen income declines are consequence of the breakdown of conflict-management arrangements.When political conflict drives aContinue reading “Political Growth Collapses”

The economic determinants of Venezuela’s hunger crisis

This paper argues that Venezuela’s hunger crisis was caused by the collapse of the country’s import capacity. I show evidence supporting the hypothesis that the key driver of the decrease in caloric intake was the decline of more than nine-tenths in oil revenues, which sparked an economic contraction and forced the economy to undertake massiveContinue reading “The economic determinants of Venezuela’s hunger crisis”