Venezuela Economic Recovery Simulator

This repository contains the analytical engine, processed data products, public-facing dashboard scaffold, and report scaffold for a project on Venezuelan economic recovery scenarios.

The project is built around one central question:

How long would it take Venezuela to recover the real GDP or real GDP per capita level of a user-selected benchmark year under a given annual growth rate, and how historically plausible is sustaining that path?

Project Principles

• The analytical engine lives in R/.
• Pipeline entry points live in scripts/.
• The app and report consume processed outputs, not raw Excel files.
• Raw inputs are kept in data/raw/.
• Historical plausibility is presented as a transparent historical-frequency concept, not as a forecast probability.

Current Scaffold

The repository is organized into five layers:

1. Raw and processed data in data/
2. Reusable analytical functions in R/
3. Reproducible pipeline scripts in scripts/
4. Presentation layer in app/
5. Public article/report in reports/article-es/

Directory Guide

• data/raw/: manual source inputs and data notes
• data/interim/: cleaned and intermediate historical tables
• data/final/: processed CSV outputs for the app and report
• R/: reusable analytical functions
• scripts/: ordered data-build scripts
• outputs/figures/: generated presentation figures (.png for HTML and matching .pdf vectors for Beamer/PDF)
• outputs/presentation/: definitive rendered HTML and PDF presentation outputs
• app/: dashboard scaffold, modules, static assets, and i18n files
• reports/article-es/: Spanish article/report scaffold
• references/: source references, including the Tableau prototype
• tests/testthat/: unit tests for the analytical engine

Planned Workflow

1. Read the Excel master file from data/raw/
2. Clean and validate the historical series
3. Recompute all derived indicators in R
4. Export app-ready CSV files to data/final/
5. Consume those outputs in the dashboard and report

Current pipeline sequence:

• scripts/00_set_up.R
• scripts/01_download_wdi_real_gdp_growth.R
• scripts/02_download_imf_weo_gdp_pc_growth.R
• scripts/03_download_imf_weo_ppp_scatter_data.R
• scripts/04_download_owid_development_data.R
• scripts/05_build_clean_data.R
• scripts/06_build_series.R
• scripts/07_build_episodes.R
• scripts/08_build_plausibility.R
• scripts/09_build_app_data.R
• scripts/10_graph_historical_recovery.R
• scripts/11_graph_wilks_composite_correlation.R
• scripts/12_graph_imf_weo_ppp_scatter.R
• scripts/13_graph_owid_development_indicators.R
• scripts/14_render_presentation.R
• scripts/15_run_app.R
• scripts/99_run_all.R

Legacy Material

The original exploratory script in scripts/01_legacy.R is preserved for reference during the transition to the new architecture.