José Antonio Gil Yepes, director of Datanálisis and a specialist in Strategic Planning, Market Research, and Public Opinion, emphasizes that eliminating rentierism in Venezuela necessitates comprehensive reforms across the entire economic, political, social, and cultural landscape. Photo: Fedecámaras website.
Guacamaya, September 11, 2025. According to sociopolitical theory, interest groups must structure their organizations similarly to the public sectors they seek to influence. If not, their lobbying efforts to shape public policy could fail.
In Venezuela’s agrarian and rural economy, the main business chambers were based in Maracaibo, Puerto Cabello, La Guaira, Carúpano, and other port cities exporting agricultural products. Coordination among these chambers was minimal. However, with the State’s increasing capture of oil revenues, Juan Vicente Gómez’s government concentrated power by modernizing the military, enhancing tax collection, and implementing extensive economic policies.
These policies included fast-tracking the oil industry under foreign control, currency overvaluation, and focusing public spending primarily in urban areas. Consequently, the economy became reliant on public spending rather than private investment, stifling non-oil exports and centralizing political control within the ruling elite.
This led to the emergence of a centralized, statist, presidentialist, partisan, populist, and rentier State. The rentier characteristic influenced the State’s operations around the distribution of oil revenues—favoring both the wealthy and the less fortunate—thereby minimizing political pluralism and turning Venezuela into a mono-exporting country.
A reorganization of the business movement became essential. In 1944, Fedecámaras was established as a centralized interest group focused on lobbying regarding the criteria and recipients of rent distributions. The business sector also pushed for the “sowing of oil,” a concept introduced by Arturo Úslar Pietri in 1936, aiming to diversify exports and thereby political power sources. Yet, in the past century, no government—except those of Isaías Medina Angarita, Carlos Andrés Pérez (second term), and Ramón Velázquez—has shown genuine interest in this proposition.
This economically illogical yet politically driven model was further entrenched by the 1973 oil policy revolution, which argued that oil revenues would rise not via increased volume but through price increases and manipulation. This reasoning, which catalyzed oil’s replacement with alternative energy sources, introduced new challenges: macroeconomic volatility, inflation, rising interest rates, ineffective economic adjustments, and weakened private investment and real wages. As a result, Venezuela’s poverty rate never dipped below 60% throughout the 20th century—a significant factor contributing to the collapse of the Punto Fijo Pact in 1998, exacerbated by declining oil production since 2014.
With the decline in rentier income, both the State and society must undergo reorganization. The government has already begun this transition, moving away from dependence on oil revenues and the prior justification for poor governance through rent distribution, which fostered obligations that kept recipients silent under the guise of “prudence.” This dynamic has shifted; the government now relies on increasingly high taxes and saves substantial amounts by maintaining unrealistically low wages and minimal investments in infrastructure and public services.
Unintentionally, this transformation is sparking a democratizing revolution. Higher taxes coupled with subpar public services are driving social sectors to reorganize and demand accountability. This is the emerging trend. Research on the foundations of the world’s most developed pluralist democracies—such as those in Northern Europe—underscores the relationship between “increased taxes and greater accountability or revolution.”
The next transformation involves the government urging businesses and workers to raise their economic contributions. Doing so could enhance tax revenues not through increased rates but by broadening the taxpayer base. This necessitates dismantling the intricate webs woven over the previous 90 years. Such an effort would prevent the rise of democratizing pluralism if companies, workers, and skilled professionals were empowered and encouraged to invest, produce, employ, offer better wages, and diversify exports.
The remnants of rentierism won’t be explained by a significant rebound in revenue but by the inability to implement economic policies that support export diversification. Expanding outward will remain a challenge as long as inflation is combatted through impoverishing policies relating to liquidity restrictions and high taxes.
In the meantime, we must focus on “growing inward.” A wise man explained to me about 50 years ago when I asked, “How does your company survive if the government has kept prices fixed at Bs.1 per kilo for over a decade?” His answer hinted that internal growth—managing internal variables like productivity and competitiveness—was essential. Increasing volume could allow for minimal profit margins to be viable, but only if sales and market share grew.
The organized business movement can adopt this principle and replicate its application without waiting for the government to alter its policies.
The key is to reduce transaction costs via partnerships among production chain links and competitors. Transaction costs emerge whenever we need to: 1) inspect the goods or services, 2) evaluate the counterparty’s compliance history, 3) negotiate exchange terms—such as price, frequency, delivery methods, volume discounts, etc., 4) monitor each transaction, and 5) appoint an arbitrator for disputes. The goal is to establish enduring agreements that remove the necessity of repeating these steps for every transaction.
Business chambers are ideally positioned to spread, educate, and promote these types of agreements to reduce transaction costs and encourage “inward growth.”
Sectoral chambers can enhance member productivity through cooperative agreements amongst competitors, known as “coopetition.” While some may view this idea as unrealistic, global giants like Samsung and Apple—fierce competitors in the smartphone arena—have adopted it. Samsung has supplied Apple with components, such as screens and memory chips for iPhones. In Venezuela, Asoproco (the Shrimp Producers and Exporters Association) serves as the most notable example of coopetition, pooling production resources, establishing joint processing facilities, and exporting volumes no single entity could achieve alone.
Regional chambers offer ideal platforms for fostering alliances across production and service chains, as their memberships encompass various sectors in close proximity. The effective methodology for cultivating this movement is termed “Locality Marketing.” This involves creating a local public-private Promoter Group, identifying the most competitive economic activities in the area, pinpointing strengths and weaknesses across each chain link, and promoting investments to boost competitiveness while branding local initiatives to attract investors and skilled personnel.
These two movements require a “psychological reframing” in both government-business and business-business relations, as well as our approaches to strategic planning. In a rentier country, these relationships were largely vertical—between individual companies or chambers and the government. However, this model has reached its limit, as the entity at the top predominantly takes rather than gives. Now, we must mentally and socially reframe our planning and growth strategies toward horizontal relationships—business-to-business—encouraged by the chambers.
Fedecámaras and sectoral federations are well-equipped to spearhead these two cooperative strategies. They possess the necessary representation and credibility to promote them effectively. Financing can also be sourced internally through mechanisms made available by the growing Caracas Stock Exchange, along with the recovery of bank credit once reserve requirements are eased. Furthermore, government initiatives that foster a more horizontal model by encouraging collaboration are definitely welcomed.