LOOK skywards in posh districts of Caracas, the capital of South America’s most economically troubled country, and you will see something surprising: construction cranes at work on rising office towers. Dozens are nearing completion during Venezuela’s most severe recession ever. In the trendy Las Mercedes area, the din of pneumatic drills starts shortly after 7am every weekday.

About 400,000 square metres (4.3m square feet) of office and commercial space are under construction in the city. “That is a significant amount,” says Carlos Alberto González Contreras, president of Venezuela’s Real Estate Chamber. This is not a sign of optimism that Venezuela’s authoritarian government is anywhere close to solving the colossal economic problems it has created. On the contrary, it is a desperate stratagem for coping with them.

Companies based in Caracas have bank accounts full of fast-devaluing bolívares and few good options for spending them. Under Venezuela’s convoluted system of currency controls, featuring two official exchange rates, it is nearly impossible to convert bolívares into dollars at an acceptable rate. Just using the cash to buy existing property usually won’t work: such transactions are denominated (illegally) in dollars and settled outside the country. So putting up new towers is the way to go.

Labour is cheap. Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, trumpets repeated increases in the minimum wage (four so far this year) as evidence of the generosity of the “Bolivarian revolution”, begun by his late predecessor, Hugo Chávez. However, the rises do not make up for inflation, which is running at an annual rate of 700%, according to the IMF. At the black-market rate for the bolívar, which has dropped 40% in the past month, construction workers earn about $30 a month.

Figuring out which companies are financing construction is fiendishly difficult in secretive Caracas. They are said to include operators of mobile-phone networks, banks and pharmaceutical firms. Pernod Ricard, a French drinks company, opened a swanky headquarters in Las Mercedes last August as a “reaffirmation of its commitment” to Venezuela, but it bought the building rather than constructing it.

Though Venezuela’s nutty economy makes building projects rational, it does not make them easy. Materials are in short supply. Workplace theft is common.

The building boom is confined to Caracas. Residential construction by the private sector is “practically paralysed”, Mr González Contreras says. In 2010, it built 90,000 homes in the country. He expects that to fall to just 5,000 this year.