Price Agreements: Why Didn’t They Work in 2018? Will They Work This Time?

Orinoco Tribune – News and opinion pieces about Venezuela and beyond
From Venezuela and made by Venezuelan Chavistas
By Luigino Bracci Roa
President Nicolás Maduro announced on September 4 2019 that he will reactivate the Fair and Agreed Price system, and instructed the economic vice president, Tareck El Aissami, to inform the population about these prices. He also said that the Price Agreement system is the only one that really worked, in contrast to the price control system, which “controlled absolutely nothing,” and price liberalization, which is where the right “wants to take the country”.
As will be recalled, the Price Agreement system consisted of meetings between the Venezuelan government and representatives of large congromerates, in order to agree on prices for 50 products of great importance to the country.
Only the first agreed upon price list, published at the end of August 2018, was fulfilled to some extent, and for a few days. In fact, a “revised” list was published a week later to correct some prices. Then they began to climb, and there was no control or sanctions by the State. In December, in fact, a new price agreement list was published, which had no major impact because all the prices published there were outdated, and what was found on the street was well above what was published.
I am writing here what I perceived as an ordinary Venezuelan, as a person that buys groceries, about these price agreement lists, with the hope that this information will reach the decision makers and the mistakes made in the past will not be repeated.
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Problems:
All this makes me deduce some things:
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In 2018, meetings between businessmen and government officials, given the results indicated above, seemed more like “between pals” meetings that tended to cover up faults among insiders, and not meetings between a supervisor and the supervised, in which the latter had to give an account of what he was doing.
If we put the same people in 2019 to do the same thing they did a year ago, can we really expect different results? Anyway, I want to leave some recommendations here. I know they are obvious, but it is important to reiterate them.
Recommendations:
Source URL: El Espacio de Lubrio
Translated by JRE/EF
He is passionate about computer science since he was about 14 years old, at that age “a man gave me a small computer that he had bought in the eighties, of those that were connected to a television and had to be programmed to work (a Sinclair ZX81 ), and I really liked it.” On his political inclination, his parents were a great influence. “They were people of very humble origins, both emigrants, dissatisfied with injustice and inequality. But they were not militants of the left. I had many other influences, classmates in HS whose parents were on the left, as well as several teachers who were trained in the Pedagogical and gave us classes at a time as conflictive as it was the presidency of CAP and the military insurrection of Chávez ” He enrolled in the UCV and in 2006 he graduated in Computing, a career that he complements with popular communication in the digital field.
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