From Financial Repression to External Distress: The Case of Venezuela

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Abstract

Recent work suggests a connection between domestic debt and external default. We examine potential linkages for Venezuela, where the evidence reveals a nexus among domestic debt, financial repression, and external vulnerability. The financial repression tax (as a share of GDP) is similar to OECD economies, in spite of higher debt ratios in the latter. The financial repression “tax rate” is higher in years of exchange controls and legislated interest rate ceilings. We document a link between domestic disequilibrium and a weakening of the net foreign asset position via private capital flight. We suggest these findings are not unique to Venezuela.

Introduction

The literature on sovereign default has identified the widespread prevalence of “debt intolerance” when developing nations experience serious debt servicing difficulties, even to the point of default, at external debt-to-GDP ratios that are substantially below the levels routinely recorded for advanced economies. Reinhart and Rogoff (2009, 2011) posit that the omission or underestimation of domestic liabilities in debt-sustainability calculations helps explain sovereign external default and restructurings at “seemingly low” levels of external debt. The problem is that time series on domestic-currency liabilities (public or private) are hard to come by and, until recently, the theoretical literature on domestic debt was comparatively sparse. As a consequence, the connection between domestic debt burdens, financial crises, and external sovereign defaults remains understudied. In this article, we investigate some of these links for the case of Venezuela from 1984–2013.

The Venezuelan experience is unique because it encompasses multiple financial crises, debt restructuring, cycles of financial and capital account liberalization and policy reversals, alternative exchange rate arrangements, and booms and busts in the country’s terms of trade in a thirty-year span. We offer an encompassing view of external vulnerability beyond sovereign default or restructuring that takes into account the private sector as reflected in capital flight (or repatriation).

In the event, financial repression accounts for public revenues similar to those of OECD economies, in spite of the latter having much higher domestic debt-to-GDP ratios. This owes to the fact that the financial repression “tax rate” is consistently higher than in advanced economies. Furthermore, the financial repression tax rate is higher still in years of exchange controls and legislated interest rate ceilings. In line with an earlier literature on capital controls, our comprehensive measures of capital flight document a link between domestic disequilibrium and a weakening of the net foreign asset position via private capital flight. These results matter because, in our view, they are not unique to Venezuela.

The article proceeds as follows. The next section describes economic and financial developments in Venezuela to provide a quantitative narrative of the evolution of domestic and external debt, while sketching the current system of multiple exchange rates and widespread capital controls. Following that, we analyze the mechanisms of financial repression used by the government to default on or tax the holders of domestic debt obligations (the haircut). The parallels with negotiated haircuts on external debt, as extensively documented in Cruces and Trebesch (2013), are discussed. We next describe variations of two different basic methodologies proposed in the literature to estimate the financial repression tax. The first of these approaches follows Reinhart and Sbrancia (2010, 2015) and decomposes the ex-post real returns on domestic debt into the unexpected inflation and ex-ante financial repression components. The second approach measures the financial repression tax (or haircut) by comparing the “market-determined” yield on foreign debt with ex-ante and ex-post returns on domestic financial instruments, as in Giovanini and De Melo (1993). The fourth section presents the estimates for the Venezuela case. While financial repression helps to “liquidate” the existing stock of domestic debt, we also show that it tends to accelerate leakages on the capital account in the form of capital flight (the topic of the fifth section), weakening the net foreign asset position. We complement the traditional measure of capital flight with an estimate of the over-invoicing of imports, which accelerates markedly in periods of exchange controls. The final section discusses to what extent the results are representative of a broader experience.

Economic Setting: Debt, Exchange Rates, and Capital Mobility

Despite soaring oil prices from 2006 to 2013, net consolidated external debt of Venezuela rose from U.S.$26.9 to U.S.$104.3 billion. The central government, however, only accounted for roughly a fifth of that increment. The difference, U.S.$60.9 billion (78 percent), owed to the standard practice of decentralization of the Bolivarian revolution, was issued by state owned enterprises and the relatively new Fondo Comun China-Venezuela (FCCV). The FCCV is a special-purpose vehicle that allows Venezuela to withdraw from a rolling line of credit at the Chinese Development Bank in exchange for future shipments of oil.

Domestic debt in local currency also climbed, rising from 36.298 million bolivares (VEF) in 2006 to 420.502 million in 2013. The nominal increase of 1,060 percent (an average annual rate of 42 percent) was partially offset by an accumulated price increase of 528 percent (or an average annual rate of 30 percent), reducing the cumulative increase in real domestic debt to about 85 percent (or 9 percent per annum). During much of this period, the combination of exchange controls and interest ceilings created a captive domestic audience for domestic government debt despite markedly negative real ex-post interest rates. The significant losses imposed on domestic bondholders escalated over time, owing to accelerating inflation.

The existence of multiple exchange rates over prolonged periods of time makes it difficult to estimate precise debt burdens. For instance, during 2013, the average parallel exchange rate premium peaked at 478 percent, while debt-to-GDP ratios calculated at market rates were about 3.9 times higher than those calculated on the basis of the official rate. Total public debt, calculated at a moderate 40 percent of GDP on the basis of the official rate (Figure 1), is transformed to a public debt burden of about 150 percent of GDP in parallel market rates (Figure 2). As Venezuela has undergone three extended periods of exchange controls spanning over eighteen of the previous twenty-eight years, we can revisit previous episodes to roughly assess where debt-to-GDP ratios stabilized once the exchange rate was unified.

In 1988, the debt-to-GDP ratio at the parallel market rate was approximately double the comparable calculation based on the official exchange rate (100.3 percent vs. 58.1 percent). Once the system of financial controls was dismantled, the process of economic reform of 1989 (El Gran Viraje), debt-to-GDP ratios stabilized around (68.2 percent), closer to the estimate calculated using the official exchange rate pre-liberalization. Figure 3, which traces the evolution of external debt evaluated at both official and parallel rates, illustrates this point. Of course, these developments unfolded during a period when the economic outlook for the region was on the mend, as the debt crisis that engulfed Latin America during most of the 1980s was coming to a closure culminating with the Brady Plan debt restructuring agreements at the beginning of the 1990s. A similar post-unification pattern was observed in 1996, when a new attempt at stabilizing the economy (Agenda Venezuela) unified the exchange rate.

Table 1 summarizes the drivers behind the fall on foreign debt-to-GDP ratio calculated at the parallel exchange rate. In 1989, foreign debt-to-GDP ratios fell 31.7 percentage points (from 100.3 percent to 68.2 percent), mostly driven by a spike in inflation (84.5 percent), which was well above the depreciation registered in the average parallel market rate (15.6 percent). In 1996, the picture looked somewhat different. Foreign debt-to-GDP ratios fell by 24.5 percentage points (from 60.5 percent to 45.7 percent), driven primarily by a net amortization of foreign debt (9.8 percent), and an inflation rate (99.9 percent) that was somewhat larger than the depreciation registered in the average parallel exchange rate (79.9 percent).

These stylized facts seem to suggest that prices during the period of controls respond to something close to an average between the official and parallel exchange rates. As exchange rate controls have been accompanied with price controls, the price level embedded in the nominal GDP does not fully reflect the marginal (parallel) exchange rate. Surely, there is a great deal of uncertainty on domestic importers and producers about the rate at which they will be able to get the next allotment of foreign currency, but that uncertainty cannot always be transferred to prices, either because of the existence of price controls, “maximum profit margins,” or demand-driven considerations.

In such circumstances, debt-to-GDP ratios calculated at parallel market rates are an upper bound, as the average marginal exchange rate is used to convert foreign debt into domestic currency (or alternatively, nominal GDP and domestic debt into foreign currency), but nominal GDP has not yet incorporated the full price effects implicit on that rate. Once the unification takes place, often coupled with elimination of price ceilings, inflation takes off and nominal GDP jumps, stabilizing the debt-to-GDP ratio at a level much closer to the one previously calculated at the official exchange rate. Thus, it all depends on the share of economic activity connected to the official rate. For example, according to Barclays (2014), in 2013 the average exchange rate was 16.0 VEF per dollar, which is somewhere in between the official rates (6.3 and 11.4) and the average parallel market rate (35.0). At that rate, total debt-to-GDP is 78 percent, which is closer to the lower bound at the official rate (40 percent) than to the upper bound estimated at the average parallel market rate (154.3 percent).

Table 1. Episodes of exchange rate unification, Venezuela 1982–2013

	Foreign Debt	Parallel Exchange Rate*	General Price Index	Gross Domestic Product	Foreign debt-to-GDP at parallel rate
1989	2.04	15.78	84.46	−8.60	−31.70
1996	−9.76	79.87	99.88	−0.20	−24.54

Notes: *Change in average parallel exchange between the unification year and the prior year. Average parallel exchange rate considers rate up to the unification month, and then the unified official exchange rate. Sources: Ministerio de Finanzas, Banco Central de Venezuela, and Thompson Reuters.

Measuring the Financial Repression Tax: Conceptual Approaches

Financial repression imposes a tax or haircut on domestic debt. The haircut is a default, but de facto rather than de jure, as the terms of the underlying debt contracts are not violated. The tax is enforced through the combination of exchange controls creating a captive audience for the domestic public sector debt and inflation running above nominal interest rate ceilings. As a result, negative ex-post real interest rates are an imposed loss on domestic bondholders—hence, the analogy to the haircuts on external debt that arise in the context of restructuring agreements. Unlike the settlement process of external debts, however, creditors have little or no say in the magnitude of the haircut. Since domestic banks and pension funds are the usual buyers of the government debt, these losses are transferred to depositors in the form of even lower negative real interest rates on deposits, which operate as an effective tax on savings. Unfunded liabilities in the pension system can quickly accumulate if the haircut is significant and there is little or no scope to make up for these losses by holding alternative assets, as purchases of foreign assets are often curtailed or prohibited altogether.

In what follows, we use two different approaches to assess the magnitude of the financial repression tax. The first of these is a modified version of Reinhart and Sbrancia (2015), which introduced a theoretical differentiation between the effects of unexpected inflation and those of ex-ante financial repression; i.e., domestic nominal interest rates below expected inflation.

The second approach is based on Giovanini and De Melo (1993), who compare “effective interest rates” on external debt to the potentially repressed “effective interest rates on domestic debt.” This is a natural exercise for emerging markets (the focus of their analysis) for the period that they consider (1974–87), as emerging market governments funded themselves through both domestic and external borrowing (in varying degrees), as documented by Reinhart and Rogoff (2011). The market-determined interest rate on external debt is a logical benchmark under such circumstances. However, as noted by Reinhart and Belen Sbrancia (2015), there are two compelling reasons why this approach is neither feasible nor desirable for broader application. First, most emerging markets had little or no external debt during the heyday of the financial repression era during Bretton Woods (1945–73); the depression of the 1930s and the subsequent world war had all but eradicated global debt markets. Second, some countries (such as the United States and the Netherlands) do not have and have not had external debt. All government debts are issued under domestic law and in the domestic currency, irrespective of whether the holders of the debt are domestic pension funds or foreign central banks.

Unexpected Inflation, Ex-Ante Financial Repression, and Seigniorage

Modifying Reinhart and Belen Sbrancia (2015), we introduce foreign debt (in addition to domestic debt) into the government’s budget constraint. The approach departs from the consolidated public budget in real terms, differentiating between cash outlays and inflows:

On the left hand side we have total cash outflows: real government expenditure, real debt service on domestic debt, real debt service on foreign debt, and the real exchange rate. Note that the ex-post real interest rate for domestic debt and foreign debt is a function of the ex-ante nominal interest rate and realized inflation, respectively.

On the right hand side are the three sources of financing: taxes, new financing via issuance of domestic and foreign debt, and seigniorage.

A note on taxes. One can also connect the government’s fiscal position to external developments by assuming that a fraction of total tax revenues arises from interest earnings on the stock of reserves held by the central bank, as in Velasco (1987), among others.

Rearranging the consolidated real public budget, we distinguish between three sources on the right hand side: unanticipated inflation, ex-ante financial repression arising from differences between free market and realized domestic interest rates, and seigniorage. Seigniorage and its corresponding inflation tax are applied to holdings of high-powered money, while the tax base for financial repression are holdings of government bonds. Moreover, inflation is not a prerequisite for financial repression nor are interest rate ceilings required to impose inflationary taxes. That is not to say there are no complementarities between financial repression and inflation taxes. Indeed, given interest rate ceilings and within certain non-hyperinflationary limits, both sources of financing are positively related to the rate of inflation. However, from a conceptual standpoint, it is important to differentiate between these components: As financial liberalization takes place, inflation-tax need not disappear; it will most likely hold while fiscal financing from financial repression vanishes and the market interest rates and the interest rates on government debt converge.

As also stressed in Reinhart and Belen Sbrancia (2015), it is important to distinguish between the effects of inflation surprises and ex-ante financial repression. The former results from agents’ failure to forecast inflation accurately while the latter responds to expected financial repression effects (i.e., even if economic agents are able to forecast inflation accurately, interest-rate ceilings below expected inflation still force real losses on their holdings of domestic bonds).

The modification to Reinhart and Belen Sbrancia (2015) allows us to examine the intersection between domestic debt, financial repression, and external developments. First, it connects the failure to refinance foreign debt with the need to resort either to financial repression or seigniorage (for a given level of government spending and taxes). Second, it incorporates the effects of a real depreciation as a financing mechanism, which usually translate into higher real money balances (printing more domestic currency in exchange for unit of dollar exports). Lastly, if government tax revenues are linked to the stock of international reserves, it becomes evident that capital flight (which is associated with a lower level of international reserves than otherwise) would, other things equal, produce larger financing needs. These needs, to the extent that they are not compensated by other forms of explicit taxation (consumption, income, and so on), leads to a greater reliance on the financial repression or inflationary taxes.

Domestic and Foreign Cost of Borrowing

The second approach to measure financial repression is based on the difference between the domestic and foreign cost of borrowing (as in Giovanini and de Melo, 1993). Foreign yields reflect free-market risk perception. Assuming that domestic and foreign bonds are perfect substitutes, we can estimate the fiscal effects of financial repression by calculating domestic debt service at yields demanded by the international market on foreign bonds. Of course, this approach assumes that there are no transaction costs, no risk differentials between domestic and foreign bonds, and that taxes levied on domestic and foreign debt instruments are similar.

Measuring the Financial Repression Tax: The Venezuelan Case

In this section we present empirical estimates of the financial repression tax for Venezuela over the 1980s through 2013 along the lines described in a previous section.

Unexpected Inflation, Ex-Ante Financial Repression, and Seigniorage: Estimates

We reconstructed the right hand side of the budget equation for Venezuela from 1984 to 2013. Given the large changes observed from year to year in the stock of domestic debt, and the fact that the maturities of these instruments are rather short, we have used the average stock of domestic debt as the basis for these calculations. In order to pin down the first and second components of the right hand side of the equation, we relied on two assumptions. The first relates to the construction of a time series for expected inflation, while the second one is a conjecture about the nominal interest rate that would have prevailed in the domestic market in the absence of financial repression.

Given the lack of survey data on expected inflation for most of the period in question, we modeled expected inflation using a “naïve” random walk inflation forecast.

No less challenging than constructing a time series for inflation expectations is the question of the “free-market counterfactual.” In order to proxy the largely unobserved free-market nominal domestic interest rates from 1984–2013, we separated the years of financial repression (twenty out of thirty) from those where free-market conditions prevailed (ten years). To arrive at these groupings, every year that began with price, interest rate, and exchange controls is considered among the former, including the two years where significant reform programs aimed at liberalizing the economy were introduced. There are reasons to believe this is a plausible strategy as in both, El Gran Viraje (1989) and the Agenda Venezuela (1996), policy packages caught the general public largely by surprise, resulting (ex-post) in significant “haircuts” on bond holders and fiscal savings derived from unexpected inflation and financial repression.

Over the ten years of comparatively free financial market conditions (1990–93 and 1997–2002), average nominal interest rates on domestic government bonds were 1.10 times the inflation rate on average, in contrast with 0.71 on the twenty years of financial repression. As a very rough approximation, we assume that during the financial repression years, nominal interest rates on domestic bonds would have yielded 1.10 times the rate of inflation. The resulting estimates can be treated as a lower-bound estimate for the financial repression tax, given that controls are typically imposed on years of economic instability (with the attendant expropriation risk), where it is plausible to expect that a higher premium over inflation would have been demanded by domestic bondholders.

The results of this exercise are reported in Table 2, where financial repression years are shaded. At an aggregate level, it is noteworthy that unidentified financial needs (the right-hand side of the equation) averaged 5.1 percent of GDP over the thirty years studied. Periods of financial repression and price controls exhibit significantly higher unidentified financing needs (6.3 percent) than otherwise (2.8 percent). Fiscal savings derived from inflation surprises (0.5 percent of GDP) were positive and significantly higher than those registered in free-market years (–0.5 percent), indicating that governments had more capacity to surprise economic agents in periods of financial repression. Ex-ante financial repression contributed 1.3 percent of GDP in years of financial repression, significantly higher than the –0.03 percent registered for free-market years. These estimates support the basic intuition that no one would buy government debt at an anticipated negative yield unless they were forced to do so. Liquidation years, defined as years where real average yield on government bonds is negative, somewhat overlap with financial repression, but are not unheard of during free market periods.

The sheer size of fiscal revenues (savings) generated via ex-ante financial repression is significant, given that the ratio of domestic debt-to-GDP averaged only 11 percent over the sample (11.7 percent over the years of controls). Reinhart and Sbrancia (2015) have documented fiscal revenues in the range of 2–3 percent of GDP coming from financial repression in the United States and the United Kingdom, but one must take into account that domestic debt-to-GDP ratios in any year in these countries is anywhere between four and eight times larger than Venezuela’s. The scenario described here is more in line with the Reinhart and Sbrancia findings from chronic-inflation Argentina. It takes a lot more financial repression (markedly bigger haircuts to bondholders) to generate fiscal revenues/savings in Venezuela, given that the relative size of its domestic debt is smaller and shrinking.

Consider for example the years 1989, 1996, and 2013, where fiscal revenues via ex-ante financial repression totaled 4.4 percent, 3.9 percent, and 4.7 percent of GDP, respectively. Given that domestic debt-to-GDP ratios were relatively low, in order to achieve those savings, the tax rate (haircut) had to be substantive. As can be seen from Figure 4, real interest rates on government bonds in those years were negative to the tune of 37.7 percent, 23.3 percent and 25.2 percent.

Out of the three components of inflationary/repression financing shown in Table 2, seigniorage is by far the largest, representing on average 4.0 percent of GDP per year. As with the preceding discussion on domestic debt, the real action is not coming from the size of the monetary base but from the very high inflation tax. Governments tended to resort more on printing money for generating fiscal revenues in times of repression (4.34 percent) than in free-market periods (3.36 percent); the difference being statistically significant at a 10 percent level. In any case, deficit monetization is significant and pervasive across the board. This points out to a chronic disequilibrium within the Venezuelan fiscal accounts, most likely related to a) the temptation of obtaining more domestic currency in exchange for oil exports by means of devaluation, and b) large real exchange rate volatility.

Table 2. Unanticipated inflation, financial repression and seigniorage: Venezuela, 1984–2013

	Unanticipated Inflation Effect		Ex-ante Financial Repression Effect		Seigniorage		Total financing
	VEF Million	% GDP	VEF Million	% GDP	VEF Million	% GDP	% GDP
1984	2	0.5			3	0.6
1985	−0	−0.0	0	−0.0	12	2.6	2.5
1986	0	0.0	0	−0.1	9	1.9	1.9
1987	10	1.4	13	1.8	21	3.1	6.3
1988	1	0.1	14	1.6	27	3.1	4.7
1989	29	1.9	67	4.4	48	3.2	9.5
1990	−28	−1.2	23	1.0	106	4.6	4.4
1991	−9	−0.3	32	1.0	205	6.8	7.5
1992	−4	−0.1	23	0.5	131	3.2	3.6
1993	16	0.3	37	0.7	146	2.7	3.6
1994	122	1.4	217	2.5	436	5.0	8.9
1995	−8	−0.1	220	1.6	436	3.2	4.7
1996	630	2.1	1,136	3.9	1,239	4.2	10.2
1997	−1,108	−2.6	39	0.1	1,888	4.5	2.0
1998	−343	−0.7	−252	−0.5	1,504	3.0	1.8
1999	−458	−0.8	17	0.0	1,902	3.2	2.5
2000	−435	−0.5	−1,574	−2.0	1,566	2.0	−0.6
2001	−344	−0.4	−1,507	−1.7	1,332	1.5	−0.6
2002	1,291	1.2	481	0.4	2,410	2.2	3.9
2003	1,600	1.2	2,120	1.6	5,400	4.0	6.8
2004	−2,846	−1.3	−3,748	−1.8	7,065	3.3	0.2
2005	−1,337	−0.4	−4,456	−1.5	8,633	2.8	0.9
2006	757	0.2	927	0.2	25,067	6.4	6.8
2007	1,538	0.3	3,678	0.7	27,608	5.6	6.6
2008	2,212	0.3	7,565	1.1	35,119	5.2	6.6
2009	−1,069	−0.2	6,939	1.0	32,561	4.6	5.4
2010	−394	−0.0	9,009	0.9	46,711	4.6	5.4
2011	−173	−0.0	16,789	1.2	76,315	5.6	6.8
2012	−12,103	−0.7	10,245	0.6	124,277	7.6	7.5
2013	76,303	2.9	124,826	4.7	272,982	10.2	17.8
Averages
All years		0.15		0.83		4.01	5.10
Controls		0.48***		1.29**		4.34*	6.30***
Free market		−0.52		−0.03		3.36	2.82

Notes: *, **, *** denote significance at the 10 percent, 5 percent, and 1 percent level, respectively. Years of capital controls/financial repression are shaded. Sources: Venezuelan Central Bank, Ministerio de Finanzas, International Monetary Fund, International Financial Statistics and World Economic Outlook.

Domestic and Foreign Cost of Borrowing: The Estimates

These estimates of various forms of inflation/repression financing involve making strong assumptions about expectations and “normal” levels of real interest rates. We also pursue the alternative approximation to the financial repression tax suggested by Giovannini and de Melo (1993). They used an ex-post measure consisting of effective interest rate payments plus arrears, divided into average outstanding stock of both domestic and foreign debt. From there, they proceed to calculate the financial repression tax by computing the differential between foreign borrowing cost (translated into domestic currency) and domestic borrowing cost, times the average stock of domestic debt.

While this approach is viable from an accounting standpoint, it misses some important sources of differentials that influence borrowing costs from an economic perspective other than interest rate payments. In particular, it ignores the fact that a large swing in prices of sovereign debt helps to adjust for the difference between the coupon rate of foreign debt and the yield demanded by international markets. The fact that these price adjustments do not occur in most of the domestic debt markets of developing countries, as the marketability of domestic debt instruments tends to be limited, is yet another feature of financial repression.

We chose the Merrill Lynch maturity-adjusted index of sovereign yield on Venezuelan foreign debt (GDVE) as a proxy for foreign borrowing cost. The only limitation is that the GDVE is available from 1991 onward, since the Venezuelan foreign debt did not float on international markets until the Brady Bond exchange occurred that year. For domestic debt yields, we have taken the effective weighted average yields on domestic public bonds reported by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Using GDVE yields in U.S. dollars, and the realized loss of value in domestic currency vis-à-vis the dollar, we calculated equilibrium domestic interest rates for domestic public debt instruments for every year. We performed two sets of calculations, using average devaluation in the official market and average depreciation of the parallel exchange market in years of exchange controls. Equilibrium rates calculated thereby have been subtracted from domestic public bonds, and multiplied by the average stock of domestic debt.

Figure 5 presents the dollar returns on foreign and domestic debt calculated at the average official exchange rate for the twenty-three years spanning from 1991 to 2013. The patterns mirror the peculiarities of the exchange rate policy adopted by Venezuela. Periods of fixed exchange rate regimes (2003–13) or dirty floating within bands (1994–95 and 1999–2002), both largely lagged inflation, followed by large devaluations leading to deep dives in the dollar return on domestic government bonds. At the official exchange rate the picture is not so startling, as fifteen years (65 percent) present positive dollar returns, albeit only half of them are above the yield of foreign debt instruments. The problem is that these calculated returns are hard to realize, as access to dollars at the official exchange rate is far from guaranteed, and most of the time barred for capital account transactions.

A more realistic approach to dollar returns on domestic debt instrument is presented in Figure 6, which uses average depreciation of the domestic currency in the parallel exchange rate market. There are eleven years (48 percent) of positive dollar returns on domestic debt instruments; only six of those with yields that are higher than those demanded by international markets. Average returns on control years are highly negative (–10.2 percent), and in particular 2013, where someone investing in a basket of domestic bonds at the beginning of the year would have seen 63.3 percent of the dollar value of its investment sunk by year end.

In order to calculate government savings or the financial repression tax, we calculated the difference between equilibrium domestic borrowing cost as described earlier, and average yield on domestic public debt outstanding, times the average stock of domestic debt on the year. Results are reported in Table 3 (using official exchange rate) and Table 4 (parallel market rates). Average fiscal revenues from financial repression come out at 1.6 percent of GDP at the official rate. Financial repression years are somewhat higher than free market years (2.1 percent vs. 0.8 percent), although the difference is not significant. If measured at average parallel market exchange rates, financial repression, on average, generated savings of 3.4 percent of GDP, with the average on years of financial repression (5.2 percent of GDP) significantly higher than free-market years (0.7 percent).

Year 2013 stands out as extraordinary due to the accelerated depreciation of domestic currency in the parallel market. Given that the average dollar price in VEF increased 217.9 percent and that the average dollar yield of foreign debt was 13.8 percent, equilibrium domestic returns on domestic government bonds would have been 244.8 percent. This figure is in stark contrast with realized yields (16.8 percent), leading to haircuts from financial repression equivalent to no less than 31 percent of GDP.

Tables 3 and 4 also show how parallel market rate estimates of financial repression tend to precede those at the official exchange rate. Take for example the three years of exchange controls ranging from 1994 to 1996. The parallel market rate was legal, exhibiting a premium over the official exchange rate of 9.9 percent (1994) and 42.3 percent (1995). As the official exchange rate lagged both inflation and the parallel exchange rate, estimates on financial repression at the official rate resulted in lower fiscal revenues for 1994 (5.6 percent of GDP vs. 7.5 percent) and 1995 (–1.8 percent vs. 2.5 percent). In 1996, the official price of the dollar increased well beyond the parallel market rate (135.99 percent vs. 79.87 percent), driving our estimates of public revenues from financial repression at the official exchange twice above those registered at the parallel rate (11.81 percent of GDP vs. 4.93 percent).

Something similar occurred in the period 2005–10. Between March 2005 and December 2009, in spite of cumulative inflation of 165.1 percent, the official exchange rate remained fixed at 2.15 bolivars (VEF) per dollar. Throughout that period, the parallel exchange rate premium went from 32.5 percent to 175.8 percent, resulting in cumulative fiscal savings from 2005 to 2009 due to financial repression at the parallel market rate (6.3 percent of GDP) nine times higher than those obtained at the official exchange rate (0.74 percent). In 2010 there was a two-step exchange adjustment between January and February totaling a devaluation of 50 percent. As a consequence, in 2010 fiscal savings from financial repression resulted in 6.2 percent of GDP at the official exchange rate as opposed to 1.7 percent at the parallel market rate. In general, as the parallel market rate maintains a significant premium throughout the whole exchange control period (see Figure 7), fiscal savings coming from financial repression are much higher at that rate than at the official exchange rate. Noteworthy when interpreting these results is the fact that domestic debt during this period averaged a modest 11.3 percent of GDP.

Table 3. Financial repression at the official exchange rate, 1991–2013

	Merrill Lynch Ave Yield	Change in official price of U.S. dollar	Equilibrium Yield Domestic	Equilibrium Domestic Yield—Average	Financial Repression VEF Million	% GDP
1991	11.88	20.83	35.19	15.13	33	1.09
1992	15.00	20.43	38.49	11.35	24	0.57
1993	10.71	32.04	46.18	14.52	48	0.88
1994	21.33	63.36	98.19	57.16	486	5.60
1995	15.98	18.78	37.76	−16.97	−240	−1.76
1996	9.83	135.99	159.18	105.80	3,476	11.81
1997	9.58	17.07	28.29	−20.80	−930	−2.22
1998	16.01	12.07	30.01	4.60	180	0.36
1999	14.38	10.62	26.52	−21.36	−908	−1.53
2000	13.31	12.26	27.20	−3.92	−254	−0.32
2001	14.71	6.43	22.09	1.06	107	0.12
2002	13.08	60.43	81.42	59.30	8,728	8.09
2003	8.89	38.56	50.88	12.37	2,648	1.97
2004	7.72	17.21	26.26	−5.89	−1,665	−0.78
2005	7.13	12.00	19.98	4.41	1,430	0.47
2006	6.57	1.81	8.50	−4.43	−1,550	−0.39
2007	9.14	0.00	9.14	1.33	481	0.10
2008	21.56	0.00	21.56	12.01	3,994	0.59
2009	14.13	0.00	14.13	−0.34	−144	−0.02
2010	13.88	76.28	100.75	87.91	63,073	6.20
2011	13.73	13.17	28.71	13.18	16,105	1.19
2012	9.38	0.00	9.38	−8.12	−16,610	−1.01
2013	13.76	42.99	62.66	45.90	155,102	5.82
Averages — All years					1.60
Controls					2.13
Free market					0.78

Table 4. Financial repression at the parallel exchange rate

	Merrill Lynch Ave Yield	Change in parallel price of U.S. dollar	Equilibrium Yield Domestic	Equilibrium Domestic Yield—Average	Financial Repression VEF Million	% GDP
1991	11.879	20.83	35.19	15.13	33	1.09
1992	15.002	20.43	38.49	11.35	24	0.57
1993	10.712	32.04	46.18	14.52	48	0.88
1994	21.327	79.50	117.78	76.75	652	7.52
1995	15.979	53.78	78.35	23.62	335	2.45
1996	9.827	79.87	97.55	44.17	1,451	4.93
1997	9.581	7.97	18.31	−30.78	−1,376	−3.28
1998	16.009	12.07	30.01	4.60	180	0.36
1999	14.375	10.62	26.52	−21.36	−908	−1.53
2000	13.309	12.26	27.20	−3.92	−254	−0.32
2001	14.713	6.43	22.09	1.06	107	0.12
2002	13.084	60.43	81.42	59.30	8,728	8.09
2003	8.887	109.35	127.96	89.45	19,153	14.27
2004	7.721	17.38	26.44	−5.71	−1,614	−0.76
2005	7.126	−5.45	1.29	−14.28	−4,634	−1.52
2006	6.565	−1.59	4.87	−8.06	−2,818	−0.72
2007	9.142	69.51	85.01	77.20	27,878	5.64
2008	21.558	−1.07	20.26	10.71	3,561	0.53
2009	14.127	35.86	55.05	40.58	16,986	2.40
2010	13.883	19.96	36.61	23.77	17,057	1.68
2011	13.726	18.22	34.44	18.91	23,115	1.70
2012	9.375	29.96	42.15	24.66	50,472	3.08
2013	13.758	217.85	261.58	244.82	827,209	31.03
Averages — All years					3.40
Controls					5.16*
Free market					0.66

Notes: * denotes significance at 10 percent level. Years of capital controls/financial repression are shaded.

Summary

Two general insights emerge from the preceding analysis. First, regardless of the methodology, government savings (the financial repression tax) are greatest during periods of interest-rate ceilings, exchange and price controls, and come close to zero when none of these restrictions prevail. The estimates are especially substantive in light of the fact that Venezuela’s domestic debt-to-GDP ratios are relatively small. Second, large misalignments across our different indicators for financial repression within the same year mirror either misalignments between domestic interest rates, exchange rates, and inflation; and/or there occur large differences in the real exchange rate at the official and parallel markets (most of the time domestic currency is highly overvalued in the official market, and highly undervalued in the parallel market). As these are pervasive throughout the sample, one can only conclude that calling years without controls “free-market years” in Venezuela may be a euphemism, helpful from a conceptual standpoint and yet inaccurate. After decades of heavy government intervention and widespread regulations going well beyond outright controls, the capacity for resource-allocation of the relative price system may be seriously impaired—not to mention that reforms may not be credible.

From Financial Repression to External Distress

Extreme forms of financial repression and high inflation can be expected to influence a country’s external balance. Emphasizing the experience during the debt crisis in developing countries of the 1980s, Dooley (1988), among others, argued that heavily depressed returns on domestic investments fuel a flight toward safety in the form of foreign assets, impairing the external balance. Makinen and Woodward (1990) stressed that, depending on the existence of exchange controls, financial repression and the inflation tax could either be substitutes or complements. Without exchange controls, high inflation stimulates capital flight, currency substitution, and leads to a contraction in the demand for domestic currency (and domestic currency-denominated assets that are imperfectly indexed) eroding the basis for financial repression (this is the substitutes case). By the same token, exchange controls create a captive market for assets subject to the financial repression tax (haircut), which can lead authorities to rely on inflation tax financing than would have otherwise prevailed (the case of complements). In this section, we investigate whether, in spite of substantial transactions costs and large penalty risks, financial repression induces capital flight in years where exchange controls prevail.

Measuring Capital Flight

In order to estimate capital flight we relied on two sets of calculations. The first of these was popular in the literature on capital flight of the 1980s (see, for instance, Diaz-Alejandro 1984, 1985, and Rodriguez 1987). It basically adds to the stock of international reserves at the beginning of the year, the current account balance, direct investment, portfolio investment, and the net variation in public assets abroad; and subtracts the ending stock of international reserves. It is the equivalent of calculating what would have been the balance of international reserves in the absence of changes in the net variation of private assets abroad and errors and omissions, and then contrasting that with the actual change in international reserves.

A second measure of capital flight quantifies the over-invoicing of imports that is commonplace in periods of exchange controls and large parallel market premiums. Exporters, of course, will have incentives to miss-invoice in the opposite direction, understating their true proceeds. In order to approximate the amount of leakages in external accounts arising from this practice, we contrast the level of imports, as reported by the Venezuelan Central Bank, with total imports declared by the Venezuelan customs (the authoritative source is the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database, UN Comtrade). In principle, there is no reason to expect persistent systematic differences or that the gap between the two sources would be higher in years of exchange controls.

We also constructed the comparable measure of miss-invoicing for all the other countries in the UN Comtrade Database, and tested for each year whether the error recorded for Venezuela is significantly different from the average error for the rest of the world. These exercises are informative on two different dimensions: (1) in the time-series dimension, we are comparing miss-invoicing practices in the years of exchange controls with other years within Venezuela, and (2) on a cross-section basis, we compare the Venezuelan estimate with the estimates of miss-invoicing for all other countries. Because the cross-section comparison is done on a year-by-year basis, we can also determine whether the observed differences between Venezuela and everyone else were significantly greater in years of exchange controls. Finally, we constructed a broader measure of capital flight that combines the miss-invoicing estimates with the balance of payments measure of capital flight. As with the individual components, we test whether this composite is significantly higher in years of exchange controls.

The Estimates

We calculated estimates of capital flight on the basis of the balance of payments statistics published by the Central Bank of Venezuela for 1984 to 2013. As noted, for our measure of over-invoicing of imports, we relied on the UN Comtrade database as well. To quantify capital account leakages in the context of multiple exchange rates, we present a range of estimates involving both official and parallel market exchange rates. We report the estimates as a percentage of GDP, in constant dollars, and as a percentage of total exports. In the case of the over-invoicing of imports, we also report the estimates as a percentage of imports.

As shown in Table 5, capital flight has been a chronic feature in the Venezuelan economy, representing on average 4.7 percent of GDP at the official exchange rate and 7.1 percent of GDP at the parallel market exchange rate, while siphoning away 17.2 percent of total exports. While we lack a counterfactual (we do not observe what capital flight may have been in the absence of controls), it would appear exchange controls have not been particularly adept at stemming the exodus.

By none of our measures did capital flight turn out to be lower in years where exchange controls were in place. Moreover, when measured as percent of GDP at the average parallel market rate, capital flight turned out to be significantly higher in years of controls (8.0 percent vs. 5.2 percent). However, it is not possible to conclude on the basis of this analysis whether controls exacerbated capital flight, or deteriorating economic fundamentals led to both tighter controls and capital flight. The endogeneity of capital controls is recognized in much of the literature (see Bartolini and Drazen 1997a, 1997b; Cardoso and Goldfajn 1998; Reinhart and Rogoff 2004).

Table 5. Capital flight estimates, 1984–2013

	% GDP (at official exchange rate)	% GDP (at parallel exchange rate)	Constant 2013 US$ Million	% of Exports
1983	5.5	11.3	6,908	19.0
1984	3.5	6.8	4,850	13.6
1985	1.7	3.1	2,263	7.2
1986	1.6	2.9	1,532	8.3
1987	−1.0	−1.6	−840	−3.9
1988	−2.7	−4.7	−2,414	−12.0
1989	7.1	7.2	5,291	21.4
1990	6.3	6.3	5,466	17.3
1991	4.6	4.6	4,264	16.4
1992	1.7	1.7	1,691	7.2
1993	−1.5	−1.5	−1,488	−6.2
1994	5.7	6.2	5,266	20.4
1995	4.4	6.2	5,267	17.7
1996	3.5	3.8	3,728	10.4
1997	6.7	6.7	8,507	24.3
1998	6.7	6.7	8,869	34.7
1999	4.2	4.2	5,783	19.6
2000	5.2	5.2	8,381	18.2
2001	7.7	7.7	12,685	35.3
2002	10.6	10.6	12,967	36.7
2003	4.5	6.8	4,893	13.9
2004	7.8	11.8	11,019	22.2
2005	8.2	10.4	14,217	21.1
2006	4.0	5.0	8,698	11.2
2007	7.8	16.3	20,369	25.6
2008	6.5	13.5	22,801	21.6
2009	7.1	20.1	25,366	40.8
2010	7.5	14.5	21,536	30.8
2011	6.1	12.2	19,890	20.8
2012	3.1	8.1	12,148	12.3
2013	2.0	11.4	8,612	9.7
All years	4.7	7.1	8,720.6	17.2
Controls	4.4	8.0*	9,724.6	15.7
Free market	5.2	5.2	6,712.5	20.3

Notes: * denotes significance at the 10 percent level. Years of capital controls/financial repression are shaded. Sources: Banco Central de Venezuela, International Monetary Fund, International Financial Statistics, Thomson Reuters.

As to the actual means through which capital flight takes place even in the context of strict exchange control regimes, two practices can be identified in the case of Venezuela. The first arises from the government’s practice of issuing dollar-denominated debt targeting domestic citizens using domestic currency. The so-called bolivar-dollar bonds of the previous decade were an attempt by the Venezuelan government to avoid issuing debt in international markets, while at the same time benefiting from the large premiums on the domestic parallel exchange market. Domestic agents, to whom these bonds were allocated in a fairly opaque and discretionary process, would then sell them at a discount in the international market, at an implicit exchange rate that was “overvalued” relative to the parallel exchange rate. It can almost be characterized as a government-sponsored capital flight. The second means of capital flight is standard fare worldwide: over-invoicing of imports, as already described.

Over-invoicing of imports turns out to be significantly higher in periods of financial repression across all the measures at standard significance levels (Table 6). As noted earlier, these results are to be interpreted with care, as the tests are silent on causation. Furthermore, the fact that over-invoicing also occurs in periods of free market (where a priori there would not be any incentive to do so) seems to point out to a consistent positive bias in our estimator, but does not explain why it results consistently higher in periods of exchange controls.

We also examined whether Venezuela’s estimates of this method of capital flight are significantly higher than the world mean. Asterisks appear next to the years in Table 6 where Venezuela’s estimates of miss-invoicing significantly differed from those estimated for the rest of the countries included in the UN Comtrade Database for each of those years. The year-by-year frequency distributions highlighting Venezuela’s relative position are presented in Appendix III. Out of the eighteen years in our sample (1984–2011) where Venezuela had exchange rate controls, in thirteen (72 percent) the miss-invoicing estimate was significantly higher than the world average, in all cases at the 1 percent significance level. In four out of the ten (40 percent) years where exchange controls did not prevail the Venezuelan error turned significantly higher than the world’s average.

Table 6. Capital flight through import over-invoicing, 1984–2011

	% GDP (at official rate)	% GDP (at parallel rate)	Constant 2011 US$ Million	% of Exports	% of Imports
1984***	2.0	3.8	2,629	7.6	16.7
1985***	1.5	2.7	1,936	6.4	12.1
1986***	2.7	4.8	2,469	13.8	15.0
1987***	3.2	5.0	2,502	11.9	14.0
1988***	3.7	6.5	3,240	16.6	13.8
1989***	2.6	2.6	1,888	7.9	14.0
1990**	1.6	1.6	1,382	4.5	11.6
1991–	2.3	2.3	2,039	8.1	11.9
1992**	2.5	2.5	2,487	10.9	12.0
1993–	2.3	2.3	2,176	9.4	12.0
1994***	2.1	2.4	1,936	7.8	14.7
1995***	2.6	3.7	3,012	10.5	16.6
1996***	1.5	1.6	1,566	4.5	10.8
1997*	1.9	1.9	2,304	6.8	11.8
1998***	1.9	1.9	2,451	9.9	11.5
1999–	0.7	0.7	904	3.2	5.0
2000–	1.5	1.5	2,348	5.3	10.5
2001–	1.7	1.7	2,652	7.6	10.6
2002–	1.5	1.5	1,761	5.2	10.3
2003–	1.2	1.7	1,205	3.5	9.2
2004–	1.9		2,632	5.5	12.7
2005–	1.7	2.1	2,791	4.3	9.9
2006***	5.1	6.3	10,775	14.4	28.0
2007***	6.7	14.1	17,034	22.1	32.8
2008–	1.1	2.3	3,811	3.7	6.9
2009–	1.0	2.9	3,595	6.0	8.4
2010***	2.6	5.0	7,228	10.7	18.2
2011***	3.8	7.5	11,900	12.8	25.4
All years	2.3	3.4	3,666.1	8.6	1,380.1
Controls	2.6**	4.3***	4,563.8**	9.4*	15.5**
Free market	1.8	1.8	2,050.4	7.1	1,071.6

Notes: *, **, *** denote significance at the 10 percent, 5 percent, and 1 percent level, respectively. Years of capital controls/financial repression are shaded. Asterisks appear next to the years where Venezuela’s estimates of miss-invoicing significantly differed from those estimated for the rest of the countries included in the UN Comtrade Database. Sources: Banco Central de Venezuela, International Monetary Fund, International Financial Statistics, Thomson Reuters, and United Nations UN Comtrade Database.

Lastly, we calculated a broad measure of capital flight, adding to the balance of payments measure our estimates on over-invoicing of imports. Results are reported in Appendix IV for the various measures, while Figure 8 highlights the composite capital flight measure as a percent of GDP at the parallel market exchange rate as well as its trend over the sample. Perhaps the most salient feature of Figure 8 is that it reveals consistently large leakages that average around 10 percent of GDP over the full sample but increased markedly in the past ten years, as the trend highlights.

Conclusions

Excepting two short-lived liberalization episodes, the financial system in Venezuela since the early 1980s has been characterized by a wide array of exchange controls and interest rate ceilings coupled with a heavy reliance by the government on inflationary finance. The result has been consistently negative real interest rates on domestic government bonds and bank deposits. The “haircut” on depositors and bondholders via negative ex-post real interest has, on several occasions, exceeded 30 percent on an annual basis. We find evidence suggesting a systematic link between significant distortions in the domestic financial system and a weakening of external accounts via capital flight.

The nature of the domestic-external interaction can give rise to self-reinforcing vicious circles. A chronically high inflation tax arising from deficit monetization coupled with financial repression spurs capital flight and weakens the country’s external position. Capital flight, in turn, weakens the government’s revenue base inducing greater reliance on inflation/financial repression taxes. This connection between large haircuts on domestic debt and a weakening in the balance of payments can also help explain why emerging markets sovereign defaults often occur at seemingly low levels of external debt, even when domestic debt levels are modest, as is the case of Venezuela.

Severe and/or chronic financial repression can help explain the dearth, limited nature, or disappearance of domestic debt markets contributing to the “original sin” problem in many emerging markets. While there are other definitions, Eichengreen and Hausmann (1999) described original sin as a situation “in which the domestic currency cannot be used to borrow abroad or to borrow long term even domestically.” Pursuing this line of reasoning, one could infer that the ability of many emerging governments to tilt their financing inwards in recent years is connected to the trends toward more liberalized domestic financial markets and lower inflation rates—trends that have, thus far, eluded Venezuela.

Notes

1. See Reinhart, Rogoff, and Savastano (2003) for a discussion of the concept of debt intolerance and an application to a broad array of emerging markets and Bannister and Barrot (2011) for further applications.
2. Besides the presence of “hidden” domestic liabilities, there are other explanations for the debt intolerance phenomenon. Reinhart, Rogoff, and Savastano (2003) emphasize the role of reputation and a history of serial default (countries with a recurring history of adverse credit events cannot digest even what are widely considered as moderate levels of external debt). Catão and Kapur (2006) highlight the role played by macroeconomic volatility in explaining debt intolerance. While volatility increases the need for international borrowing to help smooth domestic consumption, the ability to borrow is constrained by the higher default risk that volatility engenders. Kraay and Nehru (2006) emphasize the role of institutions while Mendoza and Oviedo (2006) argue that the volatility of revenues makes continuous debt servicing more challenging.
3. Reinhart and Rogoff (2009) provided long dated time series on domestic and external public debt; Abbas et al. (2010) and Barrot (2015) have recently expanded this line of research. Also, recent theoretical work has begun to focus on the nexus between domestic debt, sovereign default and, in some instances, inflation (see for instance, Aguiar et al. 2013; D’Erasmo and Mendoza 2013; and Hur, Kondo, and Perri 2013).
4. Reinhart and Belen Sbrancia (2015) arrive at a similar conclusion for inflation-prone Argentina but not for India or South Africa, the other two developing countries in their predominantly advanced-economy sample.
5. Other measures of the financial repression tax have been suggested by Easterly (1989) and Easterly and Schmidt Hebbel (1994); see also background material to Reinhart and Belen Sbrancia (2015) for a discussion of this literature.
6. The latter escapes the scrutiny of the National Assembly, is shielded from any formal mechanism of accountability, and not included in the official external debt statistics, as reported by the World Bank.
7. VEF refers to the new currency unit introduced by the Venezuelan Central Bank on January 1, 2008 (bolivar fuerte or strong bolivar), equivalent to 1,000 bolivares.
8. See chronology in Appendix I.
9. Cline (1989, 1995) provides a comprehensive analysis of these events.
10. Reinhart and Rogoff (2004) examine this issue for 153 countries over 1946–98 for which they have monthly parallel exchange market data. They conclude the parallel rate is a better predictor of future inflation but also note in the background material that based on their estimates of the over-invoicing of imports and under-invoicing of exports there is considerable cross-country variation.
11. Usually refers to the fact that the interest rate ceilings that usually accompany financial repression need not a priori be binding.
12. See Cruces and Trebesch (2013).
13. Apart from a trivial amount of Carter bonds in the 1970s, the U.S. debt is domestic, whether it is held by residents or nonresidents.
14. Note that this is the consolidated budget constraint for the government, which is obtained by combining the budget constraints of the fiscal and monetary authorities. This budget constraint makes explicit the link between monetary and fiscal policy.
15. It may be also the case that in periods of financial repression the government may have a higher potential to “surprise” via unexpected inflation. This owes to the fact that prices do not fully adjust to supply and demand forces, but rather (at least partially) follow controlled “official price lists” that are adjusted sporadically.
16. Reinhart and Sbrancia (2010, 2015) calculated the effective interest rate as a weighted average based on the actual year-by-year composition of the debt.
17. We have also estimated expected inflation using an ARIMA model for the period 1957–2013. We have reported the “naïve” random walk forecast because a) the Venezuelan economy has gone through large structural changes over these fifty-six years, and therefore parameter instability might be a relevant source of bias, and b) results do not vary significantly, except for the inflation surprise component (Appendix II replicates Table II using ARIMA forecasts).
18. In terms of real ex-post interest rates, these ratios imply a real rate very close to zero during the financial liberalization spells and a real rate average of –8.6 percent during the financial repression eras.
19. It must be remembered that risk characteristics aside, within such a small, illiquid market, these bonds do not support a “liquidity premium” that would make them viable instruments to hold even at anticipated negative real interest rates.
20. Reinhart and Belen Sbrancia (2015).
21. Bloomberg (2014).
22. Effective weighted average yield on national public debt bonds traded in the Caracas Stock Exchange; from January 1999, weighted average yield on national public debt.
23. In the case of Venezuela, government-controlled oil exports dominate. As such, this limits the scope for understating exports.
24. We estimate the quotient to perform this test to correct for the fact that larger economies would register larger absolute errors than smaller ones.
25. We have used the second revision of the Standard International Trade Code statistics (SITC-R2), available up to 2011 at the moment of this writing.
26. As a percentage of GDP at official rate (2.6 percent vs. 1.8 percent), at parallel exchange rate (4.3 percent vs. 1.8 percent), constant 2011 dollars (4,564 vs. 2,050), as a percentage of exports (9.4 percent vs. 7.1 percent), and percentage of imports (15.5 percent vs. 10.7 percent).
27. The cumulative calculation would be much higher. Thus, the magnitude of the haircut on domestic debt is on par with some of the highest calculated during episodes of external debt restructuring, as shown in Cruces and Trebesch (2013).
28. Reinhart, Rogoff, and Savastano (2003) show that more than half of the post-1970 defaults on external debt occurred at debt-to-GDP levels that would have satisfied the Maastricht criteria of 60 percent (for public debt).
29. Reinhart and Rogoff (2009, 2011) present evidence that in several emerging markets (Venezuela was not among these) domestic debt played a bigger role prior to the widespread rise in inflation during the 1970s.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dany Bahar, Sebastian Bustos, Ricardo Hausmann, and Vincent Reinhart for useful comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to the Executive Committee of the Business Association of Latin American Studies (BALAS) for presenting this article with the Sion Raveed Award during their Annual Conference held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on March 2015.

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Apéndice I: Cronología de los regímenes cambiarios en Venezuela

Venezuela — Fecha	Clasificación: Primaria / Secundaria / Terciaria	Comentarios
Agosto 1934 – 23 julio 1941	Anclaje al dólar estadounidense	Se introducen controles de cambio.
23 julio 1941 – 1 julio 1976	Anclaje al dólar estadounidense / Tipos de cambio múltiples
1 julio 1976 – 28 febrero 1983	Anclaje al dólar estadounidense / Mercado dual	Hasta finales de 1982, la prima del mercado libre se mantiene en un solo dígito.
28 febrero 1983 – noviembre 1986	Flotación administrada / Mercado paralelo / Tipos de cambio múltiples	Vinculado oficialmente al dólar estadounidense. En julio de 1983, la prima del mercado paralelo ascendió al 319%.
Diciembre 1986 – 13 marzo 1989	Caída libre / Flotación administrada / Tipos de cambio múltiples	Las primas del mercado paralelo se mantienen consistentemente por encima del 100%.
13 marzo 1989 – marzo 1990	Caída libre / Flotación administrada
Abril 1990 – septiembre 1992	Flotación administrada
Octubre 1992 – 4 mayo 1994	Caída libre / Flotación administrada
4 mayo 1994 – 22 abril 1996	Caída libre / Mercado dual / Banda deslizante de facto en torno al dólar estadounidense	Banda de ±5%. La prima del mercado paralelo saltó al 100% en noviembre de 1995.
22 abril 1996 – 8 julio 1996	Caída libre / Banda deslizante de facto en torno al dólar estadounidense	Banda de +/−5%.
8 julio 1996 – julio 1997	Banda deslizante preanunciada en torno al dólar estadounidense / Caída libre	Banda oficial de +/−7,5%; banda de facto de +/−2%. La prima del mercado paralelo desciende a un solo dígito durante este período.
Agosto 1997 – enero 2003	Banda deslizante preanunciada en torno al dólar estadounidense	Banda oficial de +/−7,5%; banda de facto de +/−2%.
Febrero 2003 – junio 2015	Anclaje al dólar estadounidense / Mercado paralelo	El bolívar fue reemplazado por el bolívar fuerte en marzo de 2007.

Nota: La moneda de referencia es el dólar estadounidense.

Detalles del régimen cambiario, 2003–2015

Fecha	Descripción
02/2003	Se impone control de cambios; tipo oficial fijado en 1,60 VEF por dólar.
02/2004	Control de cambios. Tipo oficial devaluado a 1,92 VEF por dólar.
03/2005	Control de cambios. Tipo oficial devaluado a 2,15 VEF por dólar.
01/2010	Control de cambios. Se adopta un sistema dual con dos tipos oficiales (VEF 2,15 y 2,60 por dólar).
12/2010	Control de cambios. Los tipos oficiales se unifican en VEF 4,30 por dólar.
02/2013	Control de cambios. Tipo oficial devaluado de 4,30 a 6,30 VEF por dólar.
07/2013	Control de cambios. El tipo oficial se mantiene en 6,30 VEF por dólar para ciertos sectores; se anuncia un mercado oficial de subastas (SICAD I) para determinados códigos de importación y otras transacciones en divisas. (Aunque el decreto se publicó en febrero y se realizó una primera subasta “piloto” en marzo, las subastas no se celebraron con regularidad hasta julio.)
03/2014	Control de cambios. El tipo oficial se mantiene en 6,30; las subastas SICAD I continúan (entre 11 y 12 VEF por dólar), pero algunas transacciones se trasladan a una segunda subasta creada (SICAD II).
12/2015	Control de cambios. El tipo oficial se mantiene en 6,30; las subastas SICAD I continúan (entre 11 y 12 VEF por dólar), pero las subastas SICAD II son eliminadas (entre 48 y 52 VEF por dólar); se crea un nuevo mercado de subastas (SIMADI) que abre a 185 VEF por dólar.

Apéndice II: Inflación no anticipada, represión financiera y señoreaje: Venezuela, 1984–2013 (usando ARIMA 1,1,0 para estimar la inflación esperada)

	Efecto de la inflación no anticipada		Efecto de la represión financiera ex ante		Señoreaje		Financiamiento total
	VEF Millones	% PIB	VEF Millones	% PIB	VEF Millones	% PIB	% PIB
1984	3	0,7	3	0,6	—	—	—
1985	−2	−0,4	0	−0,0	12	2,6	2,1
1986	0	0,0	0	−0,1	9	1,9	1,9
1987	10	1,4	13	1,8	21	3,1	6,3
1988	−7	−0,8	12	1,4	27	3,1	3,6
1989	28	1,9	66	4,4	48	3,2	9,4
1990	−50	−2,2	17	0,8	106	4,6	3,2
1991	37	1,2	39	1,3	205	6,8	9,3
1992	3	0,1	23	0,6	131	3,2	3,8
1993	22	0,4	38	0,7	146	2,7	3,8
1994	88	1,0	209	2,4	436	5,0	8,4
1995	−166	−1,2	194	1,4	436	3,2	3,4
1996	644	2,2	1.141	3,9	1.239	4,2	10,3
1997	−1.660	−4,0	32	0,1	1.888	4,5	0,6
1998	513	1,0	−318	−0,6	1.504	3,0	3,4
1999	−67	−0,1	19	0,0	1.902	3,2	3,1
2000	111	0,1	−1.699	−2,1	1.566	2,0	−0,0
2001	195	0,2	−1.584	−1,8	1.332	1,5	−0,1
2002	1.713	1,6	493	0,5	2.410	2,2	4,3
2003	−2	−0,0	1.980	1,5	5.400	4,0	5,5
2004	−4.384	−2,1	−3.546	−1,7	7.065	3,3	−0,4
2005	1.188	0,4	−4.814	−1,6	8.633	2,8	1,6
2006	1.943	0,5	959	0,2	25.067	6,4	7,1
2007	945	0,2	3.612	0,7	27.608	5,6	6,5
2008	1.093	0,2	7.281	1,1	35.119	5,2	6,4
2009	−3.270	−0,5	6.517	0,9	32.561	4,6	5,1
2010	1.111	0,1	9.224	0,9	46.711	4,6	5,6
2011	388	0,0	16.874	1,2	76.315	5,6	6,9
2012	−11.864	−0,7	10.258	0,6	124.277	7,6	7,5
2013	93.349	3,5	131.293	4,9	272.982	10,2	18,7
Promedio — todos los años		0,16		0,81		4,19	5,08
Controles		0,32		1,27***		4,34*	6,10**
Mercado libre		−0,16		−0,07		3,36	3,14

Apéndice III: Distribución de frecuencias de la razón entre importaciones reportadas por el Banco Central (World Development Indicators) y la suma de importaciones reportadas por aduanas (UN Comtrade Database)

Las siguientes distribuciones de frecuencias ilustran la razón entre las importaciones reportadas por el Banco Central de Venezuela (según los World Development Indicators) y la suma de importaciones reportadas por aduanas (según la base de datos UN Comtrade), desagregadas por subperíodos:

• 1984–1989
• 1990–1995
• 1996–2001
• 2002–2007
• 2008–2011

Apéndice IV: Una medida amplia de la fuga de capitales: Venezuela, 1984–2011

	Fuga de capitales	Sobrefacturación de importaciones	Fuga de capitales amplia
	Millones US$	Millones US$	Millones US$	% PIB — tipo oficial	% PIB — tipo paralelo	Millones US$ constantes 2011	% exportaciones
1984	2.162	1.210	3.372	5,4	10,6	7.325,3	21,2
1985	1.028	908	1.936	3,2	5,8	4.127,3	13,6
1986	709	1.180	1.889	4,3	7,7	3.952,0	22,1
1987	−403	1.240	837	2,2	3,4	1.688,6	8,0
1988	−1.205	1.670	465	1,0	1,8	902,0	4,6
1989	2.768	1.020	3.788	9,8	9,8	7.011,7	29,3
1990	3.014	787	3.801	7,9	7,9	6.675,3	21,8
1991	2.450	1.210	3.660	6,9	6,9	6.168,6	24,5
1992	1.001	1.520	2.521	4,2	4,2	4.125,2	18,0
1993	−907	1.370	463	0,8	0,8	735,6	3,2
1994	3.293	1.250	4.543	7,8	8,6	7.034,4	28,2
1995	3.386	2.000	5.386	7,0	9,9	8.112,6	28,2
1996	2.466	1.070	3.536	5,0	5,4	5.175,9	14,9
1997	5.757	1.610	7.367	8,6	8,6	10.541,3	31,1
1998	6.098	1.740	7.838	8,6	8,6	11.038,6	44,6
1999	4.083	659	4.742	4,8	4,8	6.503,7	22,8
2000	6.118	1.770	7.888	6,7	6,7	10.464,1	23,5
2001	9.403	2.030	11.433	9,3	9,3	14.935,1	42,9
2002	9.841	1.380	11.221	12,1	12,1	14.317,8	41,9
2003	3.783	962	4.745	5,7	8,6	5.942,9	17,4
2004	8.797	2.170	10.967	9,7	14,7	13.302,5	27,6
2005	11.738	2.380	14.118	9,8	12,5	16.558,8	25,3
2006	7.364	9.420	16.784	9,2	11,3	19.197,9	25,6
2007	17.948	15.500	33.448	14,5	30,4	36.758,5	47,8
2008	20.569	3.550	24.119	7,7	15,8	25.890,7	25,4
2009	23.505	3.440	26.945	8,2	23,0	28.158,1	46,8
2010	20.255	7.020	27.275	10,2	19,5	28.082,9	41,5
2011	19.261	11.900	31.161	9,8	19,7	31.161,0	33,6
Promedio — todos los años				7,16	10,31	11.996,0	26,3
Controles				7,25	12,15**	13.910,4*	25,6
Mercado libre				6,99	6,99	8.550,5	27,4

Notas: *, **, *** denotan significancia al 10%, 5% y 1%, respectivamente. Los años de controles de capital/represión financiera aparecen sombreados. Los asteriscos aparecen junto a los años en que las estimaciones de facturación incorrecta de Venezuela difirieron significativamente de las estimadas para el resto de países incluidos en la base de datos UN Comtrade.

Fuentes: Banco Central de Venezuela, Fondo Monetario Internacional, International Financial Statistics, Thomson Reuters y United Nations UN Comtrade Database.