Nicolás Maduro wants to take advantage of the new Venezuelan scenario that has drawn the de facto dollarization of its economy. With the premise of stimulating the anorexic Bolívar and in the heat of the “new economic dawn”, the revolutionary government has launched a 3% tax on foreign currency payments, baptized as the Tax on Large Financial Transactions (LGTF).
A measure that has immediately sowed confusion in shops and streets. The LGTF, which adds to the 16% that is already charged for VAT, intends to keep part of the millions of dollars that the Venezuelan informal economy now moves. “Using a cascading, cumulative and regressive tax like the IGTF in dollars to promote greater use of the bolivar is nonsense,” underlines economist Leonardo Vera.
“It seems more like a VAT surcharge than a tax”, certifies Asdrúbal Oliveros, director of Ecoanalítica.
The government measure also coincides with the opening of an old debate in Argentina: dollarization as a tool to control inflation, which in February, for the first time in a decade, was higher than that of Venezuela. The Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV) reported that February inflation fell to 2.9%, compared to growth of up to 4.7% in prices in Argentina.
In this way, inflation has become one of the main headaches for the government of Alberto Fernández, which instead observes how Maduro, who nominated himself for the Nobel Prize in Economics, has pulled his country out of the hyperinflation that he so much loves. overwhelmed
What path has Venezuela followed to slow down inflation? “Dollarization was the de facto way out of hyperinflation,” deputy José Guerra, shadow shadow economic minister, summarizes for EL MUNDO. Dollarization de facto and not de jure, as it is in Ecuador or Panama, “because the Constitution would have to be changed to make it like that,” confirms Guerra, a former official of the Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV).
Since he came to power in 2013, Maduro has attacked the American greenback for being a “tool of the empire”, the main “culprit” in the economic collapse that has devoured 83% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
“We are going to twist the arm of the criminal dollar,” the revolutionary boss preached then. Those were times of price and exchange control policies, expropriations and radical statism that, together with the greatest corruption in history and the negligence of its leaders, caused the collapse of the economy and public services to the point of transforming the blessed Venezuela, the richest country in America, in the poorest and most unequal of the continent.
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