Maintaining growth

It was the famous Lebanese poet Gibran Khalil Gibran who said that a nation that does not produce—that does not eat bread from the wheat it harvests or wear the clothes it weaves—is a nation to be pitied. As Cristiano Pasini, representative and director of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) for Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, argues in his article for Executive, countries with a high standard of living also have strong productive economies with well-developed industrial sectors.  Lebanon’s agricultural and industrial sectors are generally weak. However, there may still be hope for these sectors moving forward. All in the same boat Mounir Bissat, secretary of foreign affairs and head of the export promotion council at the Association of Lebanese Industrialists (ALI), tells Executive that the industry sector largely suffers from the same challenges as the Lebanese economy as a whole. He says subsidized loans for capital investments were