A besieged Venezuelan economy has receive a sorely needed vote of confidence from the Swiss financial institution Credit Suisse, which says the country’s economic travails notwithstanding, it is likely to grow by 5.5% this year.
The current prediction supersedes a previous 4% growth prediction for the country’s GDP.
The adjusted projected GDP growth figure is based on a report prepared by analyst, Alberto Rojas, and is founded on projections of a “positive income effect from high oil prices and the widespread use of foreign currencies in everyday activities.”
The Credit Suisse projection amounts to a rare piece of uplifting news for a Venezuelan economy which, for more than six years, has been besieged, first, by an oil price crash, dating back to 2014 and subsequently by the politically driven United States economic sanctions that almost completely shut off the country’s oil export tap.
Former Venezuelan Economy Minister Luis Salas has however, described the Credit Suisse assessment as a seeming “overestimation”, adding that GDP estimations are complex and that the country’s Central Bank had not released relevant data since 2019. Salas has wondered whether what he described as a “recovery or reactivation” in the Venezuelan economy is sustainable. “An economic growth of the magnitude predicted by Credit Suisse would likewise mean, for example, an electricity demand which our grid cannot meet right now,” the former Minister is quoted as saying.
Credit Suisse’s report outlined in a Caribbean News Global October 16 report, coincided with the country registering its lowest inflation levels in more than six years.
The years of economic hardship which the Venezuelan economy has had to endure has coincided with sustained US pressure on the global shipping industry to cease the movement of Venezuelan crude abroad, a policy with which the US has been largely successful despite the intervention, notably by Iran, to support the Venezuelan oil industry.
The most recent available report by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) placed Venezuela’s oil output at 533,000 barrels per day back in August. The Caribbean News Global report states however, that the Venezuelan state-owned oil company PDVSA contradicts the OPEC estimate, placing the country’s output instead at 650,000 barrels per day.
