Chavismo and Human Development in Venezuela By NANCY FOLBRE

Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She recently edited and contributed to “For Love and Money: Care Provision in the United States.”

President Hugo Chávez is dead, but the debate over “Chavismo” lives on. His economic policies were aimed at improving the living standards of the poorest citizens of Venezuela, and those are the terms on which his ultimate success is likely to be judged.

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Measured in terms of tangible improvements in human development, his achievements are significant. The bigger question is whether they can be politically and economically sustained.

A loud critic of United States policies and leader of a broader Latin American renunciation of neoliberal policies, Mr. Chávez has never been popular in the United States.

Strong aversion to both his political values and his personal style has often led to dismissive assessments of Venezuela’s economic record since he became president in 1999. But as Mark Weisbrot and Jake Johnston of the Center for Economic and Policy Research have carefully documented, the Venezuelan economy experienced significant growth after 2003, when the Chávez government successfully gained control over the national petroleum industry, and fared surprisingly well even after oil prices collapsed in 2008.

Oil revenues were used to finance large public investments in health, education, housing, pensions and food subsidies to the poor. World Bankindicators show a sharp decline in poverty from slightly more than 60 percent in 2003 to slightly more than 30 percent in 2011.

Many projects or “misiones” that Mr. Chávez put into place proved so popular that even Henrique Capriles, his opponent in the last election, promisedvoters he would maintain and augment them.

While some critics of Mr. Chávez suggest that his policies have not had much impact on other Latin American countries, others contend that they are not that different from those carried out by other social democratic governments in the region, like Brazil’s. The influential Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, past president of Brazil, has lauded Mr. Chávez’s contribution to regional initiatives.

The impact that Mr. Chávez had on other left-leaning governments in the region, especially in Bolivia and Ecuador, certainly represents part of his political legacy.

Economists have not yet developed very good tools for assessing the impact of specific development policies, partly because these are intrinsically difficult to measure. The United Nations collects data on a number of different indexes, including the Human Development Index, which combines information on income, life expectancy and actual and expected years of education.

This index shows Venezuela closely aligned with a regional average that has increased steadily since 1980. But this index is not very sensitive to short-run policy changes; both life expectancy and actual years of schooling are variables that change only gradually as the population ages.

A better indicator of short-run improvements in health is the infant mortality rate. Data collected by the Central Intelligence Agency and aggregated onIndex Mundi show significant declines in Venezuela between 2003 and 2012 – but even faster declines in Brazil, Mexico and Peru.

The same database helps explain why Venezuela’s exchange of subsidized oil for Cuban health care may deliver important future benefits. Infant mortality in Cuba, slightly higher than that in the United States in 2003, has now fallen below the United States average.

Mr. Chávez’s track record in increasing school enrollments does stand out among comparable countries. A detailed World Bank database shows that between 2003 and 2011 Venezuela narrowed the gap in gross school enrollments (number of students enrolled compared with those eligible for enrollment) between it and Brazil, Mexico and Peru (the percentage of primary school enrollments held even).

Even more striking are the effects of one particular hallmark of Chavismo: the expansion of free public higher education. Tertiary enrollments increased to about 80 percent in 2009 (the latest year for which data are available) from 40 percent in 2003, far higher levels than those of Brazil, Mexico or Peru.

We will never know what path Venezuela would have followed if Mr. Chávez had not repeatedly been elected president there. But we should recognize that much of the public spending he financed with oil revenues represents investment in the human capabilities of Venezuelans themselves.

They are the ones who will determine the ultimate meaning of Chavismo.