WHEN Venezuela was the first Opec country to call for an emergency meeting in early October no one should have been surprised. The country has been a leading price hawk within the cartel for years and high oil prices have been about the only thing propping up its crumbling economy. For Venezuela, the oil price decline this autumn could hardly have come at a worse time. While Opec's Middle East producers' finances are generally strong enough to weather a period of lower oil prices, Venezuela is enduring a prolonged economic crisis. Inflation is running at well over 50%. Exchange rate distortions have led to shortages of critical goods from medicine to toilet paper. As Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff pointed out in a recent op-ed, the country's inflation-adjusted per capita GDP is 2% lower today than in 1970.
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