He was born in Barquisimeto in 1996 and grew up watching a country become poorer each year. That experience became the center of his work: a plan to rebuild Venezuela that starts by putting financial tools into ordinary hands.

Jorge Jraissati is a Venezuelan economist and president of the Economic Inclusion Group. His work grew out of a question he first confronted in Venezuela: why does a country with so much talent and wealth leave so many people without the basic tools to build a stable life? Today he works on Venezuela’s economic reconstruction and, internationally, on how to advance financial inclusion and economic security.

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For Jraissati, those subjects are not abstract policy categories. They began in Barquisimeto, where he was born in 1996 and where he grew up watching his country become poorer, more divided, and less capable of rewarding honest work.

He remembers hearing his parents talk about the economy each year with deeper disappointment. Prices changed. Regulations multiplied. Political conflict entered ordinary life. The country that should have allowed families to work, save, invest, and rise into the middle class instead became a place where business activity increasingly depended on political access.

His parents were not political people, as he describes them. They were the children of immigrants. On his mother’s side, the family had Italian roots and settled in Acarigua. On his father’s side, the family had Lebanese roots and settled in Barquisimeto. They wanted to work, raise a family, own a home, and live a stable upper-middle-class life.

That ordinary ambition became harder to sustain in Venezuela. Jraissati recalls his father trying to import merchandise from Panama around 2012, only to confront price controls, exchange controls, and regulations that made expansion nearly impossible. In 2013, when Nicolás Maduro imposed systematic price controls, Jraissati saw his father forced to reprice merchandise and absorb losses.

«That marked me,» Jraissati said in an interview. What marked him was not only the financial loss. It was the contradiction between effort and outcome. His parents worked hard, but the system around them made honest commercial success increasingly difficult.

From Barquisimeto to economics

By age 16, he had decided to study economics. He wanted to understand why a country with Venezuela’s resources could become poorer every year. He wanted to understand why public policy could either allow people to build a future or destroy the conditions that make a future possible.

His stated goal has remained consistent: to understand economics deeply enough to apply that knowledge to Venezuela. He often describes his work in terms of poverty reduction, middle-class formation, investment, financial access, and the institutional conditions that allow families to live with dignity.

Jraissati first left Venezuela as a teenager to study English at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. His plan was to return. But the 2014 protests changed the calculation. He concluded that studying in the United States would allow him to learn faster and eventually contribute more. He later earned degrees in economics and business from Florida Atlantic University’s Wilkes Honors College, and then pursued a master’s in finance at Harvard University. His academic formation was not separate from Venezuela: it was organized around it.

The return and the field observation

In 2017, Venezuela’s protests brought him back into public advocacy. From the United States, he watched people his age protest, face repression, and go to jail. He has said he could not remain comfortable in the United States while young Venezuelans were risking their freedom at home.

That year he began speaking at U.S. universities to explain Venezuela’s crisis to international audiences, at institutions including the University of Minnesota, New York University, and the University of Maryland. His academic work also stayed focused on Venezuela: in 2017 and 2018 he wrote his undergraduate thesis on Venezuelan macroeconomics and oil, which was recognized by his faculty.

After graduating in 2019 with two degrees, Jraissati returned to Venezuela. He expected to stay only a few months before pursuing graduate studies. Instead, he stayed roughly a year and a half, from early 2020 until late 2021. That return became a formative period: it gave him direct exposure to Venezuela’s humanitarian and economic crisis. During those years he wrote about the Venezuelan crisis for U.S. and international outlets, including — by his own account — Foreign Policy, National Review, Princeton University publications, and the Institute of Economic Affairs.

He saw the crisis not only as a Venezuelan tragedy, but as an institutional case study. Venezuela, in his reading, showed what happens when a country loses the rule of law, monetary stability, property rights, financial credibility, investment confidence, and basic public services.

A comparative view

After leaving Venezuela again in late 2021, Jraissati widened the scope of his research. By his own account, he became connected with Harvard through the Abigail Adams Institute, where he held a visiting researcher role, and took a research position at IESE Business School in Spain.

He began studying other countries more systematically. He has visited numerous countries to better understand their policy challenges, including South Africa, South Korea, Kenya, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Poland, Estonia, and Latvia. The question behind the travel was consistent: what can Venezuela learn from the experience of other countries?

That path led him to create the Economic Inclusion Group, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization focused on protecting people and businesses from financial exclusion risks, helping countries strengthen economic security, and supporting Venezuela’s economic reconstruction. Its areas of work include financial inclusion, debanking, AML/CFT regulation, transnational financial repression, national financial security, and Venezuela’s reconstruction.

The five pillars of reconstruction

His reconstruction agenda for Venezuela has several pillars.

The first is energy. Jraissati argues that Venezuela is an energy-abundant country where many people still live with unreliable electricity. In his analysis, that contradiction results from poor maintenance, weak design, underinvestment, corruption, and the deterioration of the electrical grid. He points to the Guri hydroelectric complex as an example of a system whose generating capacity does not efficiently reach households and businesses. For him, energy reform is not only an infrastructure question: it is a poverty question, an investment question, and a state-capacity question.

The second is financial-sector reform. Jraissati argues that Venezuela cannot attract broad-based investment without a financial system that investors, entrepreneurs, and ordinary citizens can use. He rejects the idea that capital will automatically flow into Venezuela once political conditions improve. In his view, capital needs legal guarantees, credible regulators, usable financial instruments, and institutions capable of reducing risk.

This is where his work on financial inclusion, debanking, and national financial security becomes central. Venezuela is subject to sanctions and has been identified by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) as a jurisdiction under increased monitoring, a category often called the «grey list.» FATF states that jurisdictions under increased monitoring are working with the body to address strategic deficiencies in their anti-money laundering, counter-terrorist financing, and counter-proliferation financing systems. For Jraissati, that classification matters because financial risk assessments affect real economic behavior: a country perceived as high-risk will struggle to attract ordinary capital.

The third is financial inclusion. Jraissati argues it is often misunderstood. It is not enough for a person to technically have a bank account. Real financial inclusion means access to credit, property rights, collateral, savings tools, payment systems, business financing, and instruments that allow households to formalize assets and build wealth. That connects directly to Venezuela: a reconstruction plan focused only on oil, elections, sanctions, or foreign investment would be incomplete. Reconstruction, in his view, must also create financial tools for ordinary Venezuelans: entrepreneurs, homeowners, farmers, small merchants, returning migrants, and young professionals.

The fourth is digital assets. Jraissati argues that Venezuela’s future financial system cannot be designed as if stablecoins, Bitcoin, crypto-assets, and tokenization did not exist. In his view, digital assets can help lower transaction costs, support property formalization, and modernize parts of the financial system. He is careful to place them within a broader institutional framework: tokenization alone does not rebuild a country, and Bitcoin alone does not solve poverty. But, properly regulated and integrated into a credible financial system, they can be part of a modern reconstruction strategy.

The fifth is generational leadership. Jraissati argues that Venezuela’s reconstruction cannot simply mean restoring the old political and economic order. He has worked with a group of young Venezuelan experts, many under 40, in fields such as oil, electricity, security, international trade, and investment attraction. His emphasis is not age: it is training, merit, technical capacity, and a shared attachment to Venezuela. He also rejects cronyism. He argues that Venezuela cannot rebuild through nepotism, family connections, or political favoritism.

Beyond Venezuela

Through the Economic Inclusion Group, Jraissati’s work has expanded into international policy engagement. According to his résumé, his policy recommendations have been reflected in financial inclusion reforms, economic security policy protections, international strategies to support democracy in Venezuela, recommendations related to the EU-Mercosur Trade Agreement, and measures to strengthen youth participation in Council of Europe processes.

His résumé further states that this work involved cooperation with more than 100 lawmakers from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the European Parliament, as well as policy deliberations at the FATF and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and engagements with the U.S. Treasury and State Departments, among other institutions. INCÍSOS did not independently verify these claims, which come from the subject’s own account and résumé.

He is a research fellow at IESE Business School and at Florida Atlantic University’s College of Business, according to his résumé. His media commentary has appeared, per the same source, in The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, and National Review. He has also been invited to international forums and, according to his résumé, to lecture at universities including Harvard, MIT, and Cambridge.

Back to the starting point

Although his work is inherently political, Jraissati does not present himself primarily as someone drawn to the daily practice of politics. In the interview, he described himself as more interested in building projects, public policies, foundations, study centers, and programs that generate employment and accelerate economic development. He says he wants to help people, but not through populism. His preferred approach is institutional.

His long-term vision returns to the household where the story began. He wants Venezuela to become a country where people can work, own homes, buy cars, access credit, send their children to good universities, and live with reliable electricity and decent food. He wants young Venezuelans who developed skills abroad to return and build new companies and institutions.

That is why his work on Venezuela is inseparable from his work on financial inclusion and national financial security. A country cannot rebuild if its citizens cannot access finance. It cannot attract investment if its financial system is distrusted. It cannot create a middle class if households lack credit, collateral, property rights, electricity, and formal economic tools.

If his work succeeds, he says, success will not be measured only in laws changed or reports published. It will be measured in families who can buy food without fear, entrepreneurs who can open businesses without political connections, young Venezuelans who can return from abroad, and millions of people who can finally build the life that Venezuela denied them for too long.

Frequently asked questions

Who is Jorge Jraissati?
Jorge Jraissati is a Venezuelan economist, policy expert, and president of the Economic Inclusion Group.

What is Jorge Jraissati known for?
For his work on Venezuela’s economic reconstruction, financial inclusion, debanking, digital-assets policy, and national financial security.

What is the Economic Inclusion Group?
A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization focused on financial exclusion risks, economic security, and Venezuela’s economic reconstruction.

What is Jorge Jraissati’s connection to Venezuela?
He was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, in 1996. His work in economics and public policy was shaped by the country’s economic deterioration: price controls, exchange controls, institutional decline, and humanitarian crisis.

What does Jorge Jraissati argue about Venezuela’s reconstruction?
He argues that reconstruction requires energy reform, financial-sector modernization, investment guarantees, digital assets, property formalization, poverty reduction, and a new generation of technically trained Venezuelan experts.

What is his work on debanking?
It focuses on how financial exclusion and compliance rules can affect citizens by closing their access to financial services and undermining their economic opportunities.

What is national financial security?
The protection of citizens, businesses, civil society, and investors from arbitrary financial exclusion, illicit-finance risks, politically motivated debanking, and institutional weaknesses that restrict access to the financial system.

Has Jorge Jraissati worked with lawmakers and international institutions?
According to his résumé, he has cooperated with more than 100 lawmakers from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the European Parliament, and his work has involved engagement with institutions such as the FATF, the OECD, and government bodies in the United States and Europe. INCÍSOS did not independently verify these claims.

Where has he published?
According to his résumé, he has published analysis in outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, and National Review, in addition to peer-reviewed papers, white papers, and case studies.

What did he study?
His education includes degrees in economics and business from Florida Atlantic University’s Wilkes Honors College and master’s-level studies in finance at Harvard University.

Sources: Interview with Jorge Jraissati. Résumé and public materials from the Economic Inclusion Group. Claims about positions, academic recognitions, and institutional ties come from the subject’s own account and résumé, and are attributed as such.