Q&A with Raya Hassan

  Raya Hassan is Lebanon’s finance minister. Saddled with a debt  around one-and-a-half times the size of the country’s economic output, a gaping deficit and a lack of infrastructure, she is tasked with making a method out of the madness. In an exclusive interview Hassan sat down with Executive to discuss everything from her ministry’s performance to the economic priorities of the government. E  The ministry’s strategy to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio appears to have been successful, but we only have potentially unreliable national accounts figures for 2008 to go on. As such, how can we accurately assess the progress made in the last two years, or even make projections? For 2010 we brought an expert from INSEE [French National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies] to help us project a growth rate for 2010. On the basis of the 2008 data we extrapolated, we can then determine what the