Reuters’ Brian Ellsworth has published a detailed look at communal councils – how mcuh money they get, and what they have done with it. Contrary to what you can imagine, the piece leaves a little bit for anyone. Do you love the communal councils and believe they are the best thing since sliced bread? Here’s a…
Note: Long-time reader Dago takes the Torres/Monaldi/Morales/Rodríguez proposal for handing out oil rents to citizens and then taxing them, and frames it in an interesting, approachable way. He also talks about the likely amount we’re dealing with here, and he ends with practical implementation issues, and how to (easily) overcome them. I found it thought-provoking.…
There really should be a word for it: the systematic mismatch between the things that cause outrage in our public sphere and the ones that cripple our society’s capacity to offer folks a decent life. Kleptodysplasia, maybe? That’s what was running through my mind as I read news that, after yet another year of fixed…
Recently, opposition candidate Henrique Capriles responded to chavista suggestions that he would do away with Chávez’s landmark social programs, the Misiones. In a videotaped reply, Capriles doubled down, promising to improve the Misiones. His response was wrong on many levels. What did Capriles say?
So, this may not be the part of this last week I will remember the most, but it is the one bit of becoming a parent in Québec that I can hang a Caracas Chronicles post on. After Kimi was born, a seemingly never ending stream of doctors and nurses went through our room with…
So I had a fun back-and-forth with P. Challenger in comments about what it might take to end Venezuela’s insane – I really don’t think there’s another word for it – gasoline subsidy. For Challenger, any move to dismantle this well-loved (but, again, crazy) bit of social policy would be extremely risky in the absence…
Imagine a candidate who went to the country with this message: Compatriotas! When I am president, I will finally spread the oil wealth fairly. What I’ll do is, I’ll split the country up into four income brackets. To each of the richest 25% of households, I’m going to send a check for Bs.11,000 once a…
… or so says this new paper by Javier Báez of the World Bank and Adriana Camacho of Bogotá’s Universidad de los Andes. The authors wants to measure the long-term effects of CCTs by looking at both participation rates and achievement in standardized tests. They study a CCT experiment in Colombia called Familias en Acción. The participation…
Just a reminder that CaracasChronicles is still looking for volunteer geeks, data-heads and assorted hangers-on to carry out a unique research project: crowdsourcing a specific, costed, budgeted, worked out model for a Conditional Cash Transfer scheme in Venezuela on the basis of real data taken from INE’s Household Survey. Whether you have 15 hours a week or 15…
So, if we’re now using technology to make sure gasoline isn’t sold across the border … why can’t we use it to make sure we only subsidize gas for people who really need it? Just askin’… (HT: Kepler) #28 … asking obvious questions makes my head hurt.
I’m still more or less floored by the response to my call for volunteers to craft a Conditional Cash Transfer Program proposal. There’s amazing expertise out there. I’m only a little bit concerned I won’t really have the resources to keep all y’all busy over coming months. But then, I even have volunteers offering to…
The response to my Call for Volunteers last week has been amazing…so many dataheads, so little time! Thanks so much to everyone who’s written in. (And to those I haven’t managed to talk to yet – please look for me on Skype this weekend!) The project is simple, but ambitious: we want to crowdsource a…
CaracasChronicles is looking for volunteer data-heads to help carry out a unique research project ahead of the 2012 Presidential Elections. Parlez-vous Stata? Do you have 2 to 10 hours a week to contribute to a crowdsourced social research project over the next four months? Do you have a background in statistics, econometrics or actuarial science?…
A key issue any future opposition government is going to have to deal with is a very old one in First World social policy, but one barely talked about in our public sphere: should the government extend new social benefits to everyone, or should it try to target them narrowly on those who “need them…
The blue bars are the government’s 2011 spending budget. The orange bar is our estimate of the opportunity cost of selling gas below the world price.
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