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Since a year ago a new economic policy has been
tried in Venezuela. It is essentially an opening to foreign investment
-specially in the oil sector- and privatizations in the huge public economic
sector. As the process is developing in a pluralistic political environment
a set of influential sectors are involved: government, the oil state monopolic
enterprise, central bank, exporters, importers, national and foreign enterprises,
new oil foreign and national enterprises, state enterprises, population
groups, international bank and foreign pressure groups. These actors have
different goals and sometimes opposite interest. This fact, the lack of
a definite, consensual developing plan, and the adoption of the important
economic decisions mentioned above make the process highly indeterminated.
The use of simulation to throw some light on the situation is justified
by the multiplicity of interacting factors. But usual simulation, based
in relationships between variables descriptive of a stable structure is
not enough. The dynamic of the system is now highly dependent on decisions
of the actors and these are determined by their goals, available tactics,
perceptions of the situation, that include perceptions of the tactics of
the others, and past experiences. The process that might be simulated is
this mutual interaction among behavior changing actors and a changing system
that presents new restrictions and opportunities to them. In this work
a model is described that tries to generate scenarios of structural changes
in the socio-economic system produced by the interactions of the mentioned
actors that use changing tactics, according to their goals, the state of
the system and past experience. The scenarios, it is hoped, may help to
uncover dangers and point to unexpected solutions. The character of the
simulation experiments is exploratory rather than predictive. In the model
an initial structure is defined and the normal actions of the actors are
assumed: work, investment, spending, savings, monetary controls, international
transactions in goods, services and currency. When certain economic measures
are taken or certain variables assumed new values (inflation, foreing current
reserves, exchange rates, rates of interest, profit margins, wages, income
of population groups, country risk, investment opportunities, tactics of
other actors) different actors select tactics of their repertories. A knowledge
base is attached to each actor. This have a set of rules that relates a
set of the critical values of those variables with the available tactics.
So new tactics may be assumed and the corresponding actions are taking.The
rules can be changed by meta-rules during the simulation run to express
the actor learning. The GLIDER language, developed to deal with structural
simulation is used. In the work a detailed description of the model is
made, some instances of rules and meta-rules are given and some of the
generated scenarios are discussed.
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