CID Speaker Series: How did Venezuela Degenerate Into a Failed State and How Can it Recover?

Speakers: Douglas Barrios, Research Fellow at CID; Ricardo Villasmil, Research Fellow at CID.

About the talk: In this event, we try to shed some light on Venezuela's ongoing socioeconomic and political crisis through two complementary perspectives: the economic and the institutional. We will trace the origins of the crisis to policies taken during the oil price boom, discuss the self-destructing nature of current policies and present an agenda for democratic governance and socioeconomic recovery.

Douglas Barrios a Growth Lab Fellow at the Center for International Development at Harvard University. Before joining CID he worked in McKinsey’s Bogotá office as a Public Sector Specialist where he served public and social sector organizations throughout Latin America in a broad set of topics ranging from ICT promotion strategies to education policy design. Other previous experience include serving as an external policy adviser for local governments as well as political campaigns in Venezuela. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Economics from the Universidad Metropolitana (Venezuela) and a Masters in Public Administration and International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School (MPA-ID 2012). His research interests are focused on urban dynamics, natural resource extraction and rent management, behavioral economics and the political economics behind policy design.

Ricardo Villasmil is a Research Fellow at the Center for International Development at Harvard University. Before joining CID, he worked in private consulting in Venezuela managing projects on a wide range of strategic and organizational issues for over a decade. His interests in development economics led him to the Andrés Bello Catholic University and to the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración (IESA), where he has been teaching courses in development and macroeconomics for the past fifteen years. Ricardo's involvement in public policy dates back to 1998, when he joined Venezuela’s Congressional Budget Office and the Ministry of Finance two years later. His interests in the practice of development prompted him to take advisory roles for Teodoro Petkoff in the 2006 runoff presidential election, for the democratic coalition between 2006 and 2012 and for presidential candidate Henrique Capriles as Head of his Public Policy Team in 2012. Ricardo holds a Master in Public Policy from IESA, a Master in Public Administration from Harvard University and a PhD in Economics from Texas A&M University.