The Rise and Fall of the Oil Nation Venezuela

This book explains why Venezuela is so rich in natural resources-it has been producing oil since 1922 and harbors the largest oil reserves in the world-and yet it is also a failed nation of class-divided citizens exhibiting deep poverty in a corrupt, incompetent state. Venezuela is a bipolar nation, where two marked poles in the society exist which have historical origins and are mutually exclusive.

The book provides a critical analysis of Venezuela's history, economy and politics and explains the context and implications of the bipolar poles, known as the elite pole and the resentful pole. Both, it shows, have done serious harm to Venezuela's prosperity.

The author describes the vicious circle of oil wealth, corruption, inefficiency and world market dependency and gives recommendations for a better future.

Carlos A. Rossi is a Venezuelan economist with degrees from the American University in Washington DC and the University of Sussex in the UK. He has four decades of continuous academic and professional experience in development, trade integration, macroeconomics, international finance, diplomacy, petroleum, and history. He has worked for the Venezuelan government, the Andean Development Corporation, the Venezuelan Embassy in the United States, the Venezuelan National Oil Company PDVSA, the Venezuelan Association of Hydrocarbons, and consulting firms, including his own Caracas-based EnergyNomics since 2013. Carlos A. Rossi has taught basic economics, political economy, development finance and petroleum economics at four different universities in Caracas, and is the author of four books, two published in Venezuela, one published by a prestigious academic publisher in New York City, and this one published by the prestigious Springer publisher in Germany.

In this book, the author unravels in detail the entire history of Venezuela, from colonial times to the present day, to explain why his country is a failed nation despite - and because of - having the largest oil reserves in the world. There are several chapters about oil in this book, because the history of Venezuela and its oil production and revenues are deeply intertwined, resulting in a nation that has become poorer since the mid-1970s precisely because more oil revenues have been pouring into its treasury. Assessing Venezuela as a psychologist would do with a physically young healthy person who is mentally ill, Carlos A. Rossi puts its entire unresolved history of childhood traumas into context and discovers that Venezuela is indeed suffering from acute bipolar disorders of two class conflicts that are causing self-destructive behavior that is deeply damaging to its 28 million people, not counting the more than 7 million who have emigrated from the country, summing-according to the United Nations-the largest human exodus in the history of the Western Hemisphere; most occurring in the last decade.

The author also discovers that Venezuela has suffered from this complex bipolar condition for more than 2 centuries, from the colonial period to the present, except for a period of 70 years between 1908-1977 in the 20^th century when Venezuela was able to neutralize this disorder and prosper productively for the benefit of all its citizens, becoming the most prosperous nation in Latin America, finally achieving a hard-won democracy that flourished for almost two decades, until a fatal decision was made that re-awakened the opposing bipolar poles, the so-called Elite and Resenter poles, setting the stage for some 40 years of continued and accelerating polar conflicts that resulted in the impoverishment of all its political, economic, petroleum, institutional and social indicators.

Through the use of history - called HistoAnalysis in this book - Mr. Rossi places the past in its proper contextual framework and uses it to heal the present and channel the future to its maximum potential, thus providing the platform for the bedrock historical foundation upon which the right architecture of economic policy in all relevant dimensions - including oil production and social inclusion - can be built. One that will forever neutralize the opposing poles of our self-destructive disorder. That is this book.