MEDELLÍN, Colombia — The prediction was eye-popping even for Venezuela’s collapsing economy: One million percent inflation by year’s end, according to the International Monetary Fund.
On Monday, the fund released a periodic estimate of growth and inflation rates around Latin America, a roundup that included neighbors like Chile (where inflation should be headed to 3 percent) and Peru (where growth is predicted to reach 3.7 percent).
But it is Venezuela that continues to chart a different course from neighbors—with an increasingly breakneck economic disintegration.
Real gross domestic product, the value of goods and services produced in the economy and adjusted for inflation, is expected to fall by 18 percent in 2018, the third consecutive year of double-digit declines, the fund estimated.
