Given the drop in the price of oil this year, and given how dependent Venezuela is on oil, a 4% drop is doing good. Canada exports oil, but it has other exports that have value (including Automobiles and other vehicles and parts to the US).
Venezuela's economy is tied in with Oil. I have written about the "Dutch Disease" before and its relations to a country's economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/11/economist-explains-2
By now it’s widely understood that excessive dependence on commodity exports can distort an economy in fundamental ways. One manifestation of this principle is what has come to be known as "Dutch Disease" (named after the problems faced by the Netherlands as it reaped a windfall from North Sea oil in the 1970s). Dutch Disease occurs when a country that is excessively dependent on commodity exports experiences a price boom. The sudden inflow of foreign currency raises the demand for local currency, yielding an uncompetitive exchange rate. This overvalued exchange rate, if unaddressed, can kill the country’s other exports as well as stimulating an avalanche of imports, which can hurt domestic producers......
Overspending has two predictable effects. The first, a positive one, is to stimulate job creation. Today, Venezuela’s unemployment rate is an impressive 5.9 percent, lower even than that of Germany. The second, more negative, is inflation. In Venezuela, the inflation rate at the end of 2012 surpassed 25 percent,.....
http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/03/07/the-house-that-chavez-built/The tendency today is to blame Chavez for the "Dutch Disease" in Venezuela, but the "disease" has been a problem for Venezuela since at least WWI.
Dutch Disease
By 1929, the dramatic development of the Venezuela oil industry had begun to dominate all other economic sectors in the country, however, agricultural production began to decrease dramatically.This sudden increase of attention to oil and neglect of the agrarian sector caused the Venezuelan economy to suffer from a phenomenon known as the Dutch Disease. This "disease" occurs when a commodity brings a substantial increase of income in one sector of the economy, causing a strengthening of currency which in turn harms exports of manufacturing and other sectors.
Agriculture accounted for about one-third of economic production in the 1920s, but by the 1950s this fraction dramatically reduced to one-tenth. This sudden increase of oil production restricted Venezuela's overall ability to create and maintain other industries. The government had ignored serious social problems, including education, health, infrastructure, agriculture, and domestic industries, causing Venezuela to fall well behind other industrialized countries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Venezuelan_oil_industryJust a comment that this problem with Venezuela since BEFORE Chavez. He needed to do things that would make the Upper Middle Class hate him even more, increase the price of Gasoline, high tariff on imports all to offset etc (This was also the case with every government since WWI).
= new reply since forum marked as read
