I wonder if it will have some sort of long term impact on the economy. Is there a way of measuring relative government authoritarianism on economic development of a nation?
[1] https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4553024/alesina_...
Absolutely. That is why the US, thanks to having a multi-party democracy, never got anywhere with the industrial revolution. And that is why Putin's Russia is leading the world in technological innovation and economic growth.
Of course, if when you say "political stability" you mean the absence of things like civil wars and coups, well yes, that really helps economic growth. But I don't think Xi is making himself dictator-for-life because China is on the verge of that sort of instability.
Mao, Stalin, Chavez, Castro, Hitler, Mussolini, Chiang Kai-Shek ... a few of these strongmen presided over brief periods of spectacular economic growth, but always under unsustainable conditions. Many citizens (and the citizens of neighboring countries) paid a terrible price.
It's never spectacularly efficient, but the US' form of democracy is meant to be much lower variance. I think it's a good tradeoff.
citation needed
Didn't stop him from dismantling democratic institutions, eliminating all political rivals, invading his neighbors, and murdering millions of people.
Specifically, vote count manipulation, the Supreme Court refusing to allow opposition legislatures to be seated, the constitutional committee stripping the legislature of its power... that's dismantling democracy.
Eli5 Their economy was mostly oil, they seized assets of oil companies extracting it. People left then oil crashed and they had too many promises to pay for
How was all this inevitable? When a government doesn't like that private companies are making money, and steal their property then replace skilled managers with party cronies, maybe things aren't going to work out so well. Maybe other companies will be afraid to invest in the country. So yea, the country gets a short-term boost from acquiring billions of dollars of assets, then all the profits that used to go to the company go to the state. But then it doesn't grow or handle problems properly because no one has the same incentive to work hard and innovate.
If the price of toilet paper is high in America, there are dozens of companies that are going to compete to get that profit, supply will rise and the price will drop. In Chavez's Venezuala, the toilet paper companies get nationalized, and government bureaucrats do their best to make and distribute enough toilet paper. Or maybe they don't and just report that they are doing a good job.
Here's a short list from 2012 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-election-nation... and you can be sure there were many companies that bent over backwards to comply with governmental demands to avoid being nationalized. It turns out the Venezuelan government, like most other governments, is not good at managing production and providing a prosperous economy without a free market. And when regulations mean a company (for example a toilet paper company) can't make a profit to create what they are selling, they can't make enough of it, and soon they won't be able to make any of it.
It's all about human nature and incentives, and yes most 5 year olds understand that.
A question would be eli5 lambda calculus. Actually if there is an eli5 for that it would be fun to read.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Venezuelan_oi...
The Chávez administration used high oil prices in the 2000s on his populist policies and to gain support from voters. The social works initiated by Chávez's government relied on oil products, the keystone of the Venezuelan economy, with Chávez's administration suffering from Dutch disease as a result.
When prices collapsed they had all eggs in one basket.
Now what was seized and not discussed in the wiki was oil platforms from foreign companies. Sometimes instead of Chavez paying a debt, he would seize the platform and "nationalize it" so this caused foreign companies to be wary of investing.
https://books.google.com/books?id=TFY_DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA116&lpg=...
On to hyperinflation
To assuage the oil price decline which began back in June 2014 and continues through to today, President Maduro printed more currency,
Pretty sure we've watched that 'democratic' experiment fail spectacularly, at least what news I know of the economy and living conditions in general seem very poor at best. Failed state comes to mind.
Chavez was the previous ruler and hasn't been gone so long that the systems he set up have been washed away by time
I'm not a huge fan of authoritarian systems, but individual people are even more fallible. Laying decision-making power on one individual is a recipe for failure; they're going to be wrong eventually, and chances are people will be reluctant to speak out against their god-emperor when that happens in a system where power is so ridiculously centralized.