Two Venezuelas? The IMF sees 9% growth; the minimum wage is still 130 bolívares

One hundred thirty bolívares has been Venezuela’s minimum wage since March 2022, and it is also the social security pension. At the official rate of October 13 it is worth fifteen cents of a dollar. The night before, the IMF published its new series for the country: the economy grew 9% in 2025. In April, for the same year, the Fund calculated 1.5%.

Between those two figures lies the question anyone who lives in Venezuela or has money there asks: whether there are two countries. There are, and finding them does not require leaving official statistics. They sit in the same table of the Central Bank of Venezuela, and the line that separates them runs through the payslip, through who pays and in which currency.

A number with a new author

First, the author of the figure changed. In the Venezuela note of its April report, the IMF warned that, for most indicators, data for 2018 to 2025 were estimates by its staff and should be read with caution. The October series no longer resembles those estimates: it matches, year by year and to rounding, the one published by the central bank, from annual declines of more than 20% between 2018 and 2020 to 15% in 2022 and 9% in 2025. Under the April series, the economy had grown 20% between 2022 and 2025; under October’s, 44%.

The methodological note that would explain the change is still missing. What is in plain sight is that the central bank rewrote its own series: the 2025 growth it announced in March was 8.7%, and its current file says 9%; the second quarter of 2025 went from 6.7% to 9.2%. Revising national accounts is normal in any country. What was lost along the way is a cross-check. The activity index of the Venezuelan Finance Observatory, calculated outside the central bank, has not been published since April 2025, and its last reading showed a 2.7% contraction in a quarter for which the central bank now records a 9.4% expansion.

None of this turns the 9% into fiction. Gauges that do not depend on the central bank point the same way: private manufacturing grew 8% in the first half of 2026 according to Conindustria’s survey, with industry using just over half its capacity, and new car sales rose 70% between January and August.

The economy is growing. The useful question is where.

Where it grew

By activity and by type of spending, the central bank publishes output only as growth rates. In 2025, oil activity grew 15% and fixed capital investment 16%. Household consumption rose less than 6%. Government consumption, 0.6%.

With about a quarter of output at 2007 prices, oil explained roughly four of every ten points of growth in 2024 and 2025, by our own calculation from the central bank’s rates. It is also the part that admits two readings. Every month OPEC publishes two figures for Venezuelan output, the one the government reports to it and the one estimated by secondary sources, and for 2025 the first grows 17% and the second 8.5%.

That is 1,081,000 against 941,000 barrels a day. The central bank’s oil activity tracks the first.

Chained backward, the same rates give the scale: the 2025 economy is 36% of the size it had in 2013, household consumption 42% and government consumption 24%. The 9% is measured on that base.

Where the money comes in

Toward the rest of the economy, that growth has one gateway, and it is the oil dollar. Since January, the Venezuelan state’s share of crude sales goes into US Treasury accounts created by Executive Order 14373, and the State Department decides what is released. Transparencia Venezuela estimated that of about $15.2 billion exported in the first half of 2026, between $6.4 and $8.2 billion corresponded to the government. In the same half, the central bank sold about $6.1 billion to the foreign exchange market, nearly eight of every ten of oil origin.

That is how the barrel reaches the street, in dollars the central bank places with banks, importers and companies. It shows in what is bought: what the United States sold to Venezuela between January and July 2026 already exceeds all of 2025. And it shows in what is paid: the average private manufacturing wage reached $541 in the second quarter, 16% more than a year earlier.

From households, ENCOVI, UCAB’s living-conditions survey, records it. Between March and June 2025, income poverty fell to 68.5% of households, from 73.2% a year earlier, and inequality narrowed. The survey attributes it to the dismantling of controls and some recovery in incomes, and notes that private-sector pay is improving and already exceeds self-employment income: the average private employee earned $230 a month.

That Venezuela exists, and it is the one the 9% describes well.

The payroll that did not move

The other is paid by the state. Neither the 130-bolívar minimum wage nor the social security pension has been touched since March 2022; what rises are bonuses. The $240 minimum comprehensive income, announced on April 30, is paid through bonuses, so it does not count toward vacation pay, profit sharing or severance. What would happen to severance if that bonus became salary. In September, pensioners received a comprehensive income of 58,800 bolívares, about $69, on top of their 130-bolívar pension.

In the same ENCOVI, the average public employee earned $117 a month, half of a private one, and accounted for more than one in five people in work. Teachers have had their pay scale frozen since 2022: according to Cendas, their federation’s research center, the average teacher’s salary covered 0.3% of the food basket in February 2026. For October 13, education, health and university unions called a march to Miraflores to demand that those scales be revised.

From the other side, the national accounts record it. Government consumption, where the public payroll is booked, grew 0.6% in 2025 and fell 1.1% in the second quarter of 2026, while output rose 7.1%. It is the part of the economy that has not taken part in the recovery, and it pays more than a fifth of those in work.

The dollar that buys less

One variable moves the two Venezuelas in opposite directions, and it is the price of the official dollar. Between January and September 2026, the central bank’s reference rate multiplied by 2.8 and consumer prices by 3.3. Because prices ran ahead of the exchange rate, an income tied to it, whether a private salary in hard currency or the minimum comprehensive income, bought about 13% less in September than at the start of the year, by our own calculation from the central bank’s series.

The food basket shows it without any calculation. Cendas’s family food basket cost $755 in August, a third more in dollars than a year earlier, and equals just over three minimum comprehensive incomes. At $298, the average industrial worker covers about two fifths of it.

The other Venezuela, that same variable enlarges. Measured in dollars, the IMF projects output rising from $101.5 billion in 2025 to $124.2 billion in 2026, a 22% increase. Five of those points are production; the rest comes, by our own calculation, from domestic prices running ahead of the exchange rate, the same effect that had inflated SENIAT tax collection measured in dollars.

What makes the economy bigger in dollars is the same thing that makes the paycheck smaller in dollars.

The bridge the government proposes

To join the two Venezuelas, the government proposes using the number that has just changed. At Fedecámaras’s annual assembly on October 8, acting president Delcy Rodríguez said she had asked her economic team that “starting next year all growth in workers’ remuneration must be above GDP, above the country’s economic growth.” The results of the labor consensus talks, she added, will come in November.

That leaves open the two questions that decide whether the bridge exists. The first is which growth: the IMF now projects 5% for 2026 and 7% for 2027 in volume, with average inflation of 175% in 2027, and pay that rises faster than nominal GDP and pay that rises faster than real GDP are very different rules. The second is which remuneration. That was the word chosen, not salary, and salary is the only thing that counts toward severance.

Three data points will show how close the two Venezuelas get: the IMF’s note on where its figures come from, the text of the rule that comes out of the November talks, and government consumption in the central bank’s next quarterly accounts.

Until then, the 9% describes well the Venezuela paid in dollars by a company, and very little of the one paid in bolívares by the state.