Plan an oil and gas sovereign wealth fund

As part of Executive’s ‘10 Ways to Save Lebanon‘ issue, we asked leading experts from a range of fields to put the case for one major policy for the country. In this article, Sami Atallah from the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies discusses ways to protect the country’s offshore oil and gas wealth.   In the coming years, Lebanon could begin to reap the benefits of its offshore oil and gas reserves. These resources could be worth tens of billions of dollars in a country where annual gross domestic product is little more than $40 billion. This new source of wealth has the potential to completely transform the country’s economy and society. But the dangers are also clear; almost every society that discovers resources ends up less competitive in other key sectors of the economy — the so-called ‘resource curse.’ Whether Lebanon can avoid this or not depends on how