Before March 2026, the obstacles to recovery for Lebanon’s fractured economy were Herculean, but not completely hopeless. Standing in the way of reform were entrenched corruption and the ongoing aggression from Israel under the guise of a ceasefire [inlinetweet]following the 2024 conflict which displaced over a million people and inflicted billions in infrastructure damage. [/inlinetweet]Following the February 28 unprovoked US and Israeli attack on Iran, a renewal of that active conflict in Lebanon quickly escalated into a threat scenario where the human costs and infrastructure damage of the past two years could be exceeded and distrust and social tensions brought to new heights.

While the decisions over the new war and its regional escalation could at no time be influenced by the government in Beirut, the potentially world-changing conflict drives home a lesson on the importance of complete sovereignty. Governing a country in compounding crisis requires decisions made quickly, often under pressure, and with incomplete information. Yet Lebanon’s capacity to measure its own economy — to count what it produces, what it owes, who is working, and who is not — has severe limitations. This is a story about what happens when a state in crisis cannot reliably count.

Making the data work

Data collection in Lebanon does not operate through a single integrated system, and not all datasets are systematically published for public access. There is no single centralized platform where all relevant economic data can be accessed in one place. Cooperation generally exists, but standardization, accessibility, and consolidation remain limited. The system functions, yet it relies heavily on administrative effort.

From a public finance perspective, access to information is generally available. Obtaining budgetary and fiscal data often begins with formal requests. “Through my personal experience, never the data was not received,” says Tonia Salameh, economist and data analyst at the Institut des Finances Basil Fuleihan (IOF). “Sometimes the data is received very fast and sometimes not, but we receive it.”

Institutions generally cooperate. The challenge begins after the data arrives.

Rather than flowing through standardized digital systems, information may come in scanned PDFs, non-tabular Excel sheets, or even printed documents requiring manual entry. “Each institution has its own format. There is no unified format that everyone is using,” Salameh explains. “Sometimes we even receive papers, and we do the data entry.”

As a result, analysts spent significant time transforming and cleaning datasets before meaningful analysis can begin. Immediately focusing immediately on interpretation, analysts are required to standardize and reconcile raw data, increasing delays and creating room for inconsistencies. Salameh refers to the underlying administrative and digital infrastructure. “If the system is not available, you can’t gather high-quality data. If the system is old and not everything is automated, how will you gather the data?”

From the private sector perspective, the Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture of Beirut and Mount Lebanon compile economic reports by drawing from multiple official sources: the Central Administration of Statistics, Banque du Liban, the Ministry of Finance, customs authorities, and international institutions, each operating within its own reporting framework. Executive spoke with two representatives from the Chamber of Commerce who preferred that their responses be attributed to the Chamber as a whole, rather than to be personally identified. “We always get data from the main sources to ensure accuracy,” one representative explains. “But sometimes figures do not match.”

GDP estimates may differ significantly between domestic and international organizations, because of different methodologies. According to one anonymous representative from the Chamber of Commerce, the variance was “around 2 billion dollars” for nominal GDP in 2023 (IMF estimates were $23.6 to 24 billion). Additionally, the growth projection revealed a wide gap, the representative notes: “Even the IMF reports 3.5 percent growth, whereas the government says 5 percent.”

These discrepancies do not necessarily imply manipulation. They reflect methodological differences and the absence of a centralized consolidation and validation mechanism. Without institutional reconciliation, cross-verification becomes the responsibility of external analysts rather than the state itself. Similar challenges appear in labor statistics. Unemployment estimates vary widely across reports ranging from around 30 percent to over 40 percent. Additionally, the most recent comprehensive labor update dates back to 2022.

In agriculture, the Centre de Recherches et d’Études Agricoles Libanais (CREAL) presents a third model, one built on continuous field data collection rather than episodic surveys. “Statistics are continuous,” says Riad Saade, president of CREAL. “That’s the difference.”

CREAL’s system is self-funded and developed over decades. It tracks agricultural production across seasons, regions, and micro-economic variables. “We don’t study a product; we study the season,” Saade explains. Agricultural output varies by region, climate, irrigation methods, and production cycles, making seasonal monitoring more accurate than broad national averages.

CREAL relies on field engineers embedded in local communities to track planted areas, productive areas, yields, irrigation methods, production costs, and farmers’ prices. Data is double-checked and continuously updated, producing a detailed picture of agricultural performance.

Yet when asked whether the Ministry of Agriculture systematically relies on this data for policymaking, Saade’s answer is clear: “No, not at all.” CREAL’s ongoing assessment further suggests that while Lebanon’s agriculture sector has received substantial external funding over the past decades, output has not grown in proportion to that investment.  According to Saade, one reason for this is that many projects have not been effectively adapted to the Lebanese context or informed by local data. Instead, they often follow standardized international models led by foreigner project managers.

Across sectors, the pattern is consistent. Data exists. It is collected with effort. It is considered credible. But it is not systematically integrated into policy decisions.

Structural weaknesses beneath the numbers

A deeper constraint lies in digital infrastructure itself. Not all government data is fully digitalized. In some cases, datasets exist but are stored in outdated systems or paper archives. Without full automation, systematic extraction and aggregation become difficult. Lebanon’s statistical challenges extend beyond formatting issues. They reflect deeper structural realities.

A significant share of economic activity operates informally. Businesses remain unregistered. Labor is undeclared. Income is partially unreported. Even the most sophisticated statistical system cannot fully capture activity that escapes formal oversight. “Yes, the share of the informal sector in Lebanon is very high,” IOF’s Salameh acknowledges. “So, part of the data is not available to be analyzed.”

Political instability further disrupts continuity. During years when parliament failed to approve annual budget laws, fiscal reporting lost consistency. “We have data for some years, then not for others,” Salameh explains. “For instance, in 2021 and 2023, the budget law was not approved. We had the draft, but not the law.” Spending continued, but the annual budget was not formally approved by parliament. The issue was not the absence of figures, but the breakdown of institutional rhythm.

Exchange rate volatility added another layer of disruption. During periods of multiple exchange rates, economic values lacked a single reference point. Analysts were forced to calculate currency components separately. “With multi-pricing, you can’t build a strong economy,” a Chamber representative says. Currency inconsistency complicates not only markets but measurement. When prices, wages, and public accounts operate under different benchmarks, statistical comparability weakens.

CREAL raises a different but related critique: the design of donor-funded statistical projects.

“The project managers usually are international staff, and apply the standard methodology by the book,” Saade says. “The project is not usually adapted based on knowledge of Lebanon and its context.” His argument is methodological. Statistical models, he asserts, must reflect local diversity, production patterns, and socio-economic realities rather than rely exclusively on standardized international templates.

Informality, political instability and national insecurity, and exchange rate volatility are constraints that are mutually reinforcing: a large informal economy shrinks the tax base, which weakens institutional capacity, which reduces the quality of statistics, which makes it harder to design policies that bring informal activity into the formal economy.

If data exists, how much does it shape policymaking?

At the IOF, Salameh sees growing demand for evidence-based analysis. “Now there are more requests for data,” she says. “Everyone is realizing that we need evidence-based information to make decisions.” She adds, “Everyone is affected if a decision is not based on facts.”

From the Chamber of Commerce, the tone is less reserved. “If decisions were fully based on figures, we wouldn’t have been in this situation for six years,” said one representative who asked to remain anonymous, referring to the multi-layered economic crisis. At the same time, the Chamber noted that in areas such as port revenue and taxation monitoring, improvements have been planned. Efforts to strengthen revenue collection and reduce leakage show that data and oversight can support specific reforms, particularly in the context of fiscal collapse. However, these improvements remain limited rather than part of a broader systemic change.

Saade had another view. “Decisions are based on either incomplete data or incorrect data.”

The divergence in tone reflects a deeper uncertainty: data may be requested, but its integration into structured policy design remains inconsistent.

When decisions move ahead without reliable measurement, consequences accumulate gradually. Businesses may misjudge investment conditions. Citizens may face poorly adjusted tax or subsidy measures. Public spending may be misallocated. Reform sequencing may weaken. Inaccurate or incomplete data does not isolate risk; it spreads it across the system.

At the same time, economic figures now circulate rapidly in a politically charged digital environment. Salameh notes: “We are in an era of social media and technology, it is very easy for someone to publish any number, and it goes viral whether it is true or not.”

 For example, at the beginning of the economic crisis, claims circulated online that Lebanon ranks first globally in gold reserves, a statement later shown to be misleading. While the country holds large gold reserves, it does not rank among the top holders worldwide.

She stresses the importance of verifying sources. Not every figure shared on social media or television can be trusted, and reliable data should be drawn from recognized institutions. Yet accessibility remains uneven. “Not everyone knows where to find these data,” she adds. While official statistics may be published, they are not always easily located or widely communicated to the public.

The Chamber representative agrees that media scope often includes selective or misinterpreted statistics, though he maintains that official figures from recognized institutions remain broadly reliable.

The problem is not necessarily data production. It is interpretation and the absence of consolidation. When multiple figures circulate without clear reconciliation, confusion can replace clarity, even when underlying data is credible.

Beyond counting: What reform requires

Lebanon’s economic challenge is the absence of institutional integration that allows experts to operate and datasets to inform policy. Reform must begin with strengthening the statistical system itself. Ministries and public institutions require harmonized methodologies, standardized digital formats, and predictable publication schedules. Data collection should follow clear institutional mandates rather than depend primarily on temporary projects or external funding. Stable budgets and technical investment are essential for continuity.

Equally important is linking statistical production to structured policy evaluation. Lebanon lacks a permanent macro-fiscal modeling capacity within the government. Major policy decisions including budget proposals, tax measures, subsidy reforms, and public wage adjustments should be assessed against transparent economic projections before implementation. In Lebanon, there is no formal mechanism obliging policymakers to demonstrate that decisions were informed by available evidence. That absence is itself a policy choice.

Institutional leadership must come from the government, particularly through research and statistical authorities. But coordination should extend beyond government. The private sector, research institutions, and specialized agencies should operate within a structured ecosystem where data production, analysis, and policy design are aligned and available for all.

The issue is not only technical. In a country facing overlapping crises and limited control over external shocks, the ability to reliably measure the economy becomes essential for making informed and independent decisions. Without it, decisions are made under pressure without a clear understanding of their consequences.

The Ministry of Culture (MoC) has launched a new strategy for Lebanon’s creative and cultural industries (CCI). Based on inhouse research and stakeholder interaction, the surprisingly extensive document is as economic as it is cultural. As it stands, it seems the strategy is intended to diagnose and invigorate a struggling sector, but also to signal a more proactive, collaborative, facilitating, and ultimately powerful role for the ministry itself.

As stated in the strategy, it aims to “strengthen the cultural and creative ecosystem so that it can contribute to its full potential to economic recovery, social cohesion, and better positioning of our country in the region and the world.” Presenting this ambitious framework to ministerial colleagues, stakeholders and media on February 10 (almost exactly one year since ascension of the current council of ministers), Ghassan Salameh, the minister of culture, repeatedly described the plan as “ambitious.” It is difficult to disagree. The question is whether the level of ambition exceeds reality.

Identifying the challenges

Nearly a year in the making, the strategy is the product of a bottom‑up process in which over 500 professionals from the subsectors of the CCI have been invited to focus groups, questionnaires and workshops. These sectors include film/audiovisual, music, heritage, museums, performing arts, visual arts, public libraries and design. Additionally, a representative has been chosen from each sector to act as a link between the respective subsector and the ministry.

Even newer creative and content spheres in the digital realms, which are deemed by economists crucial for future wealth, are however not given an own category in the CCI strategy as provided on the ministry’s website. There are over a dozen references to digital issues sprinkled across the almost 50 content slides of the strategy, including reference to a strategic imperative of “investing selectively in cultural infrastructure and digital capabilities”. Nonetheless, the strategy does not elaborate on how and whether the required public policy safeguards or capital expenditures would be implemented for such a demanding endeavor.

Despite these omissions, the final document identifies wide-ranging interventions recommended for each sector – such as improving the legal status of designers, drafting a new heritage law, advocating the removal of taxation on non-commercial performances and many more. In total, the strategy contains 162 initiatives throughout the nine subsectors.

The obstacles facing Lebanon’s cultural industries are extensive: outdated laws, years of underinvestment, underdeveloped digitalization, lack of data collection and talent flight – just to name a few that have been on the minds of stakeholders for several decades. And since 2019 the CCI has been shaken badly by the succession of economic crises, COVID-19 pandemic, Beirut Port explosion and the latest regional conflicts. During the pandemic, which means early during these years of intertwined social, economic, and creative calamities, full-time employment in the CCI fell by more than two-thirds and unemployment or underemployment increased by nearly 1,000 percent, according to a 2021 survey commissioned by GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit).

Not explicitly stated but reverberating throughout the presentations and debates of the MoC launch event was the subliminal message that the quagmires of CCI stakeholders are mirrored in challenges faced by the institution that produced the strategy. Beneath the splash of aspiration to make CCI succeed as economic growth drivers in a new Lebanon, is a message that the MoC has set its sights on ploughing more extensive economic grounds than in the past.

Not only does the culture ministry seem to in this way be departing from the pre-crisis economic paradigm where financial services were perceived as the sole services sector worthy of serious administrative and strategic attention but it appears determined to jump over its shadows of having a lesser weight than the line ministries that were in control of cash cows and fiscally attractive portfolios.

But while the ministry’s domicile at the National Library is, from several cultural perspectives, awe inspiring, the ostentatious dignity of the venue cannot hide the fact that the MoC is still a budgetary stepchild of a financially exhausted governmental parent. Remarks by MoC staffers and the minister reveal that underfunding and understaffing in the budget year of 2025-26 are even greater challenges for the MoC today than they were in the less fiscally desperate years before the crisis. Still more troubling could be the still lingering stigmata of being a government unit beset with crumbling building assets, issues of censorship, and polarized and arduous disagreements over Lebanon’s true cultural identity.

Strategy by estimation

That the path of CCI development will not be as easy as one can make it look in a slide presentation becomes unmistakable when delving deeper into the document. The strategy’s many specified recommended interventions are a timely analysis of what needs to be done to support the growth of the CCI. But there is a gap between idea and execution – and here the strategy becomes more unspecific.

With 162 initiatives, it could be rather difficult to choose where to start. Therefore, the strategy classifies initiatives into three categories according to feasibility, sequencing and dependencies, allowing priority to be given to the most realistic and urgent implementation recommendations. These 162 initiatives range in size with one of broadest reaching being the establishment of “a cultural incubator program through select partners,” while others reach a smaller interface like reopening the National Cinémathèque or developing and publishing the archaeological review BAAL online. All these are called “recommended interventions”, which – even with the prioritizing – makes it difficult to identify which parts of the strategy are promised and which are just recommendations for what could be done.

The only real benchmark presented by the minister at the launch was the goal of the CCI to contribute 7 percent to GDP by 2031. But this goal is not written in the final strategy document, nor supported by any micro- or macro-economic data projections. Yasmine Helou, Chief of Staff at the Ministry of Culture, tells Executive that the minister’s statement indicates the institution’s hopes for having a role in fortifying the council of ministers’ economic growth program and that implementation of the CCI strategy could help, five years down the road, the currently much lower CCI share in GDP recover to 5 percent – or even reach 7 percent.

When asked about how the calculation for this “hope” was done, Helou explains: “It is a projection based on the limited pre-crisis data available on the economic performance of the CCIs. It is based on their documented contribution to GDP prior to the crises, combined with an assessment of sectoral resilience and recovery potential. Given existing data constraints, this figure is an indicative estimate rather than a formally adopted target within the strategy.”

While it is acknowledged that the CCI has a high value for the Lebanese economy, and while we can’t know whether an implied world-leading role of Lebanese CCI in their national economy will become obtainable, there is no denying that such hopes are running up against multiple walls of economic uncertainty.

Between vision and implementation

To be fair, the specific interventions are clearly defined. And it is commendable that the sector stakeholders have been thoroughly included. But the road to implementation seems more uncertain, which is deeply discontenting because the two systemic weaknesses that presently still obstruct any governmental economic aspirations are failure to implement and failure to collaborate among ministries with adjacent and overlapping realms of authority.

The strategy’s breadth poses its own risks. In total, the interventions require multi‑year efforts and dedicated institutional capacity – resources the ministry simply does not possess at present.

In practice, the ministry has relied heavily on voluntary contributions.

“We’ve seen in the past year how willing volunteers in this country are to help, to get involved and to actually work. So, the idea arose to establish commissions where we name people from the private sector who want to get involved and allow us to link and follow up with the ministry in a more institutional way without having to go through the whole hiring process. This is one thing we’re trying to find,” Helou says.

Besides acting effectively by virtue of harmonious inter-ministerial collaborations, securing institutional continuity within ministries is a paradigm that has hardly been demonstrated in the political track record on post-civil war Lebanon. Achieving trustworthy institutional continuity at the Ministry of Culture would in this light be an amazing and laudable feat once the next council of ministers comes into their own at an indeterminate time point after the parliamentary elections scheduled for this spring.

But this feat seems easy when the ambition is to become an economic enabler of unprecedented dimensions. To name one example, the establishment of a “cultural incubator program,” which the CCI strategy lists as primary core cross-sectoral need (i.e. spanning several sectors identified as constituting CCI) must be read in the economic context of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship ecosystems.

According to Helou, the program would have to be “very big”. Also, it would best be run by an institution with significant capacities in coaching and mentoring on business plans, financial sourcing and management, legal compliance, best practices in corporate governance, and subsector-specific operational priorities for varied CCI startups or young enterprises. The MoC has not yet designed and developed the incubation idea to a point of having set a target number on how many cultural entrepreneurs it wants to enroll per cohort, nor to a maturity of having scored a commitment from an existing provider of business incubation services.

Finding a financially and culturally capacious provider with sustainable appetite for becoming involved in what effectively would not so much be the “strengthening” of a Lebanese cultural and creative ecosystem as the construction, from below ground, of a CCI ecosystem that combines being cultural and creative with prospects of economic sustainability. Helou notes, “I think that CCI has a lot of incubation potential but many of those [cultural institutions] that we have covered did not actually become economically viable.”

The vague idea for an incubation program reinforces the ruling image of previous Lebanese administrations that the ministry of culture has historically promulgated state positions regarding cultural affairs but has not been a central actor in fostering viable subsidies for cultural actors, let alone economic markets for CCI. Local experience of entrepreneurship ecosystems supporting the viability of young tech and agricultural enterprises confirms that an incubation program with all the bells and whistles for supporting startup entrepreneurs, will embellish the potential of CCI to deliver an aspirational slice to GDP, however large the slice and the total might be in five or ten years’ time.

It further confirms, however, that a state-supported or internationally sponsored incubator program does not an ecosystem make. The task of establishing an ecosystem actually is complex and has proven anything but pitfall-free or fast in the two primary efforts of fostering entrepreneurship in the Lebanese context: the tech incubators and accelerators under the knowledge economy imperatives of the Lebanese central bank’s massive push in the 2010s (“circular 331”) and the Agrytech entrepreneurship development push for inclusive and productive agriculture ventures spearheaded by Berytech where first, in GDP terms quantifiable, success came years after it was kicked off with considerable foreign sponsorship / donor support.

For the time being, meaning the outlook for at least this year and possibly a full parliamentary period of four years, dedicated human and financial capital, or vulgo quality employees and money, is not what the ministry of culture can be expected to have reliably at its disposal.

In principle, the recent practice of depending heavily on unpaid labor introduces both continuity risks and increasing likelihood of emergent conflicts of interest and outright corruptibility. The political uncertainty after the next elections further calls into question the durability of the strategy. The ministry is attempting to finalize as many agreements as possible, but implementation of the full strategy clearly extends well beyond the current political cycle.

And all that does not yet touch upon the question how digital Lebanon will define its cultural identity in a global and regionally polarizing environment of divergent desires and external pressures. The future will be digital, or nothing, but who will design it? 

You could wonder how sustainable these preconditions are for implementing all the various pillars of the strategy. But the ministry is aiming to do as much as possible with the resources they have at hand. They have already started the implementation of some interventions, like the digitization and standardization of the national libraries. This indicates a shift in progression. However, attempting to address all the issues outlined in the strategy appears to be an overreach. One could even wonder whether the minister’s explicit acknowledgment of the strategy’s level of ambition is a way of admitting that the goals may not all be attainable. It seems as if the ministry itself is aware of the uncertainty:

“You try for the best and then you do as much as you can,” says Helou.

With contributions by Thomas Schellen