Reading these honestly
2026 is a partial year. Annual totals on this page stop at 2025, the last year both harmonised publishers carry as an outturn; everything after it is a projection and stays out of the plates.
The bolívar was redenominated three times inside this window: 1,000 bolívares became 1 bolívar fuerte in 2008, 100,000 bolívares fuertes became 1 bolívar soberano in 2018, and 1,000,000 soberanos became 1 bolívar digital in 2021. No local-currency level is drawn anywhere: money is a share of GDP, US$ or an index, and the one series that crosses a redenomination — the official exchange rate — is converted through the documented divisor and says so.
The exchange rate and the reserves stop in 2017 and the holes are left open. The Central Bank stopped publishing on a route this network can reach, and no parallel or market rate is substituted: a parallel rate is not an official statistic.
Growth, the overall balance and the trade balance are drawn on the atlas's shared comparison scales, which were widened for this country and regenerated for every peer, so a collapsed economy registers in the comparison viewer instead of being squeezed into a range built for business cycles.
Two panels are lenses and say so on their faces. Inflation is drawn on a log axis — the IMF's staff estimate for the whole window and the BCV's own INPC as a separate short line to 2016 — because no linear axis can hold 65,374% beside a 2% deflation without either clipping the peak or flattening twenty years to a line. Net migration is drawn on its own axis for the same reason: −45.5 per 1,000 in 2018 is an emigration wave, not a migration rate.
Two publishers, two lines: real growth, dollar GDP and unemployment are drawn from both the World Bank and the Fund wherever both exist, labelled, because Venezuela submits no national accounts and the two are independent estimates of the same rebased series. The gap between the two dollar GDP lines is which official exchange rate each used, not a revision.
The population is the UN model, not a count: no census has been taken since 2011. It is the denominator for every per-1,000 rate on these plates, and the 2016–2021 fall in it is modelled emigration.
Two seams are annotated rather than smoothed: the 2009 inflation seam, where the BCV's rebased INPC says 27.08% and the Fund did not follow the revision and says 26.00%; and the 2016 suicide spike from 6.1 to 10.5 per 100,000, which is a change of WHO estimate vintage and not behaviour.
The Gini is the one national series that runs the whole window, and it is nearly flat through the largest economic collapse in the region's modern history. That is the publisher's claim, not this atlas's finding: the INE documents neither the survey's coverage nor its non-response in the emigration years, and the independent university survey that reports far higher inequality is not an official statistic and is not used.
The plates are drawn in the three languages this country publishes — Spanish, English and Portuguese — and so is this page.
Source, data and chart code on GitHub
Built from committed CSVs on 2026-10-25
Plate 01
