The Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas de Venezuela is not a normal institute for national statistics like the German Federal Statistical Office Institute or the British Office for National Statistics. The INE is basically a propaganda organisation that churns out numbers for Chavismo to use. There is no independence from the central government. Chávez and his team call the shots, they want nice numbers.
Chávez has recently repeated over and over again that Venezuela has a lower unemployment level than Spain, the EU in general or the United States. On the recent Hard Talk BBC interview the former coup monger said Venezuela is in recession just because of the US's economic woes and lower oil prices in 2009. In reality oil prices were low in 2008 but in 2009 they were already up again to levels much higher than in the eighties or nineties. If you are part of the 70% of Venezuelans who have no cable TV or Internet connection or access to Globovisión from living in Caracas or read the couple of critical newspapers with a very limited circulation, your information about how Venezuela's economy compares with that of the outside world is based on stuff like this:
I took it from the INE site, but basically the regime repeats that kind of information on the national radio and on the only national-wide TV stations that anyone can get without cable or satellite dish: those of the government.
Still, if you look a little bit - at least for now - in the INE site, you will detect some interesting data. You will find out about what percentage of "employed people" are actually what Venezuelans called "informal workers", people who are street vendors, pirate taxi drivers and the like. They have no dole money, they simply have to do anything to survive. They pay no taxes. Actually, most legal workers in Venezuela don't pay taxes either because they earn too little. I plotted the data again using the INE data and some from economist blogger García (here, Spanish).
You get a very different picture, don't you?
A person with a "job" in Venezuela