Economy
The attacks on private property make a dent in the situation of constitutional rights in Venezuela.

According to the 2010 International Property Rights Index (IPRI), Venezuela ranks 121 among 125 economies in the ranking of protection of property rights tied with Chad and Zimbabwe and just above Cote d'Ivoire and Bangladesh which rank last.

The IPRI, prepared by the Property Rights Alliance of the United States, the Free Enterprise Institute (Peru), was originally published in 2007. It is released in Venezuela by the Center for the Dissemination of Economic Knowledge for Freedom (Cedice Libertad), with data compiled by international institutions such as the World Bank, the World Economic Forum and other business organizations.

The IPRI is an annual study that compares countries in terms of their protection of property rights, both physical and intellectual, investigating the effects of a country's strong legal and political environment, as well as recognition and enforcement of physical and intellectual property rights on the economic development of a country.

In 2010, Venezuela scored 3.2 points in the IPRI ranking, being 10 the highest ranking. Last year, Venezuela had obtained a score of 3.3 points.

The IPRI focuses on three areas: Legal and Political Environment (LP), that measures the judicial independence, the rule of law, political stability, and control of corruption; the Physical Property Rights (PPR), which measures the protection of physical property rights, registration of property and access to loans, and finally the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), which assesses the level of protection of intellectual property rights, patent protection and copyright piracy.

Venezuela was ranked 122 among the countries studied with respect to the Legal and Political Environment. As for the protection of physical property rights, Venezuela ranked 114, and with regard to the protection of intellectual property rights Venezuela ranked 108 among 125 countries.

According to the study presented by Law professors Tomás Arias Castillo (Caracas Metropolitan University) and Luis Alfonso Herrera (Andrés Bello Catholic University and Central University of Venezuela), "the takeover of a significant number of private agrarian lands starting in 2005, has become a State policy. The government's strategy of systematically denying the existence of private property in different areas reached its highest manifestation with the enactment of new decree-laws in 2008 and recent legislation passed in 2009 by the National Assembly."