Venezuela’s post-2015 economic collapse produced the largest displacement in Western Hemisphere history outside of armed conflict: 7.7 million Venezuelans had left by 2023, driven by hyperinflation, food insecurity, and political instability. ENCOVI’s 2022 National Survey of Living Conditions — the principal independent social measurement instrument in Venezuela — found that 53.3 percent of the population was living in extreme poverty (income too low to buy a basic food basket), down from 68 percent in 2021, with income poverty at 81.5 percent. The extreme-poverty rate constitutes the inaction-side harm proxy: the share of the staying population experiencing outcomes severe enough that, given counterfactual access to emigration, most would plausibly retrospectively have preferred to leave. It is an outcome proxy, not a measured regret rate — no survey directly asks Venezuelans who stayed whether they regret not emigrating. The Mixed Migration Centre’s 4Mi returnee data add circumstantial support: even returnees who reached Venezuela expect to struggle for an income (76 percent) and worry about access to food and water (57 percent).
The action side captures a real and significant cost. In the Mixed Migration Centre’s 4Mi survey of Venezuelan returnees (n=269), 71 percent said their return was partly driven by problems in the host country — including 26 percent who could not generate enough income to settle there — while only 18 percent returned because they had achieved their goals abroad. That 26 percent hardship-abroad figure is the action-side proxy: it measures difficulty making a living among people who gave up on emigration, not a self-reported “I should not have left” regret rate. The leading stated motivation for return was actually family reunification (81 percent) and homesickness (63 percent), with failure to integrate into the host country (23 percent) and inability to regularise status (22 percent) among the structural push factors. Most Venezuelan emigrants who remain abroad do not return at all, so the proxy captures a hardship subset rather than population-wide regret.
The regret_delta of -0.273 captures a genuine asymmetry: the documented harm rate of staying (53.3 percent extreme poverty) exceeds the documented hardship rate among returnees who left (26 percent unable to make a living abroad), consistent with the Gilovich inaction-dominance pattern and the temporal logic of crisis migration. In the short term, emigration is costly: the route is arduous, early months abroad are disorienting, and social status often drops sharply. Over time, however, those who left and established themselves in receiving countries typically ratify the decision through downward counterfactual thinking — imagining the extreme poverty, food insecurity, and institutional collapse they avoided. Those who stayed and experienced those conditions face the inverse. Both proxies carry uncertainty of approximately plus or minus 10 percentage points, and the crisis has evolved since the 2022 reference year; Venezuelan economic conditions in 2025 are materially different from 2019. The entry describes the crisis period and should not be applied as a forward-looking assessment.