Lebanon has a long history as a shipping and trading hub, leveraging its geographical location on the Mediterranean Sea and connecting mainland Europe to the Arab hinterland. It was several thousand years ago that religious texts referenced the peoples of Mesopotamia (in what is now modern day Iraq) first migrating and settling on the coastal…
Long overdue reforms
After nine months of deliberations, Lebanon formed a new government at the end of January. Saad Hariri, now in his third term as prime minister, announced a reform agenda as the cabinet’s raison d’être. Since 2011, Lebanon’s economy has been exhibiting recessionary symptoms and reforms are needed to reboot the economy. According to media reports…
Take initiatives to fix the state
Executive has collected different initiatives recommended to enhance state output and economic performance, with the primary sources being the Lebanese government, multilateral development institutions, and the McKinsey economic vision. The corresponding table reflects the state of the initiatives roughly one year after Lebanon presented its Capital Investment Plan at CEDRE in April 2018. Some progress…
Arab summit shows a Lebanon at the mercy of disinterested regional powers
The Arab League Economic and Social Development summit hosted in Beirut in late January produced at least one solid takeaway: the reiterated recognition that Lebanon does not hold the keys to its own future and so must ride the bench during this economically and politically pivotal time for the region. With a government finally formed…
An accumulation of economic woes
Executive met with then-caretaker Minister of Economy Raed Khoury to discuss McKinsey & Company’s economic vision (commissioned by the government in late 2017 and published in early January), the ministry’s progress in regulating private generation of electricity, and the political and economic situation of Lebanon ahead of mid-January’s Arab League Economic and Social Development summit,…
Lebanon’s parliamentary productivity
At first glance, the legislative output of the Lebanese Parliament impresses with its extreme volatility. To full understand the matter of legislative productivity requires a contextual view that takes political environment into account. The election of Michel Aoun as president in October 2016 ended almost two and a half years of vacancy in the post,…
Is there a real estate crisis?
Since at least 2014, the country’s real estate developers have been warning of troubling times ahead. The sector slowdown had begun much earlier, as Executive reported in its October 2018 real estate special report, and sector stakeholders have, for several years now, expressed hope that the next year would be better—repeating this mantra, as if…
Ziad Hayek discusses new PPP projects
At the end of October, Executive interviewed Ziad Hayek, secretary general of the High Council of Privatization and PPP (HCP), to learn of proposed public-private partnerships. The HCP had organized stakeholder meetings to discuss public-private partnership (PPP) proposed projects. This interview primarily discussed two PPP projects that are now in the pre-planning phase—the expansion of…
Lebanon faces a lot of big IFs in 2019
Since 2011, Lebanon’s economy has been exhibiting recessionary symptoms. Economic growth slowed from 8 percent in 2010 to 0.6 percent in 2017, as measured by the country’s public bean counter, the Central Administration of Statistics. For 2018, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) projected GDP growth at just 1 percent. At the time of this writing,…