Public services and government that used to work well now don’t, and opportunities that everyday folk used to have they now don’t.
It’s still a nice place if you’re in a good career, but the long term prospects don’t look good.
There's so much research on developing countries, but I find deteriorating countries more interesting. There are many countries that used to be first world, and simply are not anymore. Argentina is the classic example, South Africa is the most heated example.
[0] https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/GDP-...
Which was a policy suggested by an Iraqi (Farouk al-Kasim) to the Norwegian government. [0]
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feab...
America won’t try to coup that part of the world. (As far as I know.)
The world in 2023 is different from the world in the 1970s which is different from the world in the 1940s.
2. The institutional changes that caused Venezuela's dramatic slide only really began to take hold in the 2000s, and were exacerbated by the global collapse in commodity prices in the 2012-15 period.
3. Plenty of petro-states across South and Central America have in 2023 reached a state of development comparable to eastern members of the EU (ie. In the 0.7 or high development range).
4. GDP per capita is a crummy metric to compare economic development. GDP (and ergo per capita GDP) are metrics to benchmark production, not social development, which are better measured when looking at metrics such as HDI, Life Expectancy, Literacy Rate, Median Income, Childhood Mortality Rate, etc.
Even though Venezuela had a very high GDP per capita in the late 1970s/early 1980s, it was extremely unevenly distributed. In fact, in the time period that Venezeula had the 4th highest GDP per capita, it's Gini Coefficient (the metric for wealth inequality) was 0.500 [0]. This is in line with Angola and Zimbabwe today, and was much worse than other nations across South America.
By that time period, the kind of interventions you saw in Chile, Guatemala, etc were not as vogue, with the Iran-Contra Scandal acting as the final nail in the coffin for any direct clandestine intervention.
Venezuela's problems today are caused by Venezuela's leaders mismanaging the economic dividend in the 2000s and elites on both sides of the aisle in Venezeula working to undermine institutions to their benefit.
[0] - https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-05147-2_...
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-scale-of-gl...
[1] > The United States war in Afghanistan continues destroying lives due to the war-induced breakdown of the economy, public health, security, and infrastructure. Afghans have been massively improverished by the conflict. 92% of the population faces some level of food insecurity and 3 million children are at risk of acute malnutrition. Some regions are currently facing famine. At least half the population is living on less than $1.90 per day.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/af...
[2] https://theintercept.com/2021/08/26/afghanistan-america-fail...
Results are similar if you ignore PPP. [2]
I’m not really sure where your numbers came from but I assume the ranking is a bit sensitive to the time boundaries (ie recovery from gfc and pandemic) so I don’t know how relevant it would be even if I had found the same results as you.
I found the uk looks a bit better for growth from 2010 to 2019, which ignores some pandemic recovery failures mentioned in the OP and Germany’s larger 2009-2010 growth.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/national-gdp-wb?tab=chart...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/national-gdp-constant-usd...
The peers are Germany, Spain, Italy, France. Ie other large countries.
If all that GDP growth is going into the hands of just a few players what's the point?
The whole point, as I understand it, is to research what happens in the (still) rich and advanced nations which (slowly) lose their riches and advancements.