Functional Income Distribution in Venezuela, 2019-2025: Reconstruction, Validation, and a Range for 2025

Venezuela has no official data on compensation of employees (RE), gross operating surplus and mixed income (IK), or net taxes on production and imports (TG) after 2018. The MDCD panel v1.1 fills 2019-2024 with a three-year moving average (2019-2021) and the author\'s own estimates (2022-2024). This paper documents that status, tests the reconstruction, and presents a range for 2025. The observed series has a level shift in 2015 of 8 to 11 percentage points (pp), robust to specification. A backtest shows that the moving average adds nothing over the last value (six-year RMSE of 6.1 pp). A wage-anchored bridge model gives 26.0% of GDP for 2025, but level uncertainty widens the 80% interval to 17.7-34.3%. External checks do not validate post-2018 levels: Penn World Table labor shares are imputed, and ILO modeled values (about 10% of GDP) lie below the paper\'s estimates. Compliance with a constitutional minimum-wage benchmark co-moves with RE in levels (r = 0.80) but not in differences. Venezuela remains in the lowest archetype in all scenarios.estimated, so the comparison is descriptive. For 2025, a wage-anchored bridge model gives 26.0% of GDP (25.2-26.8% when the elasticity varies from zero to twice its calibrated value), a figure that rests on a parameter calibrated on other author estimates. Adding level uncertainty, the 80% interval is 17.7-34.3% and the 95% interval 13.4-38.7%; under pure persistence, 20.4%. Venezuela stays in the lowest archetype (PPDI) in all deterministic scenarios and in 89% of simulations. Dropping the six reconstructed observations leaves the typology thresholds unchanged (32.9; 41.9; 48.8).