Reading Time: 13 minutes At the time of writing (March 12) the number of known coronavirus infections had exceeded 126,000 and that the death toll was above 4,600 persons. Governments around the world have dedicated increasing medical, social, humanitarian, and financial resources toward bringing the threatening virus under control. At the same time, worries over the economic impact of…
Analytical approaches to economic rescue plans for Lebanon
Reading Time: 7 minutes Lebanon’s political economy today is in a situation where risks are existential and inaction opens the gates to disaster, but potential payoffs are highly skewed to the upside—if successful. This suggests that the newly eager-for-action behaviors in the political class—which appear in many ways counter intuitive to previous decision-making patterns here—convey at least a modicum…
Experts tackle Lebanon’s dilemmas with a plethora of rescue plans
Reading Time: 13 minutes IN BRIEF The implications of Lebanon’s current fiscal crisis are grave, but not fated to be devastating. Economic rescue plans circulating remain in the pro-private and neo-liberal economic modes of thought. As a result, there is a reassuring amount of overlap but little efforts to explore solutions outside these paradigms. At the beginning of 2020,…
Transition scenarios and their bleak alternatives
Reading Time: 10 minutes For the roundtable on financial reality, monetary needs, and trade and energy issues, the discussion brief invited debate on the role and responsibility of the central bank, the banking sector, the insurance sector, and capital markets in Lebanon, coupled with exploring the country’s circumstances with regard to trade and remittances, its interdependency on international financial…
The search for a fairer, more redistributive tax system
Reading Time: 6 minutes The roundtable covered in this piece was dedicated to economic angles of fiscal reform and taxation. Thus, in the context of Executive’s mission and coverage focuses, both it and the accompanying sixth roundtable on financial reality were a hardcore expression of this magazine’s existential paradigm to cover the Lebanese economy to the best of its…
Hard new looks at the tech ecosystem and its entrepreneurial future
Reading Time: 7 minutes Before the October 2019 uprising, it was not difficult to list unresolved questions and some outright disappointments with the way that the Lebanese entrepreneurship ecosystem had been shaped in the past six years since Lebanon’s central bank, Banque du Liban (BDL), effectively launched it with publication of its Circular 331. In mid-November, amid the uprising,…
The madness of clowning around in an economic tornado
Reading Time: 8 minutes Two months after a blundering collage of new budgetary revenue measures drove people into a unified and spontaneous civil uprising, the state of Lebanon remains an unresolved mess. Six weeks of attempts by the political regime to uphold and reorganize what the people perceived as a corrupt system only made the country’s social and economic…
Executive’s roundtable initiative
Reading Time: 3 minutes When darkness and despair are the first two options on the menu for your country, followed by austerity and depression as the plat de jour proposals, nothing is more appropriate than to assemble a crowd of light seekers and path finders. In this sense, it is a testimony to the seriousness of the national economic,…
Keep the spirit of this revolution
Reading Time: 3 minutes Constitutions are serious stuff. The one that I grew up under is known as the Grundgesetz—the fundamental law of Germany. In its first line, this constitution declares that the dignity of the human being is inviolable and that the state has to honor and protect it. Back at the time of this constitution’s drafting 70…
Houmal Technology Park
Reading Time: 5 minutes Houmal Technology Park (HTP) can be an example of tech manufacture and fruitful entrepreneurialism. Export orientation of tech companies can be realized independently from the Lebanese entrepreneurship ecosystem that relies on Circular 331. First-mover disadvantages of pioneering tech companies need to be compensated by state and municipal partners for creation of productive clusters. Risks pertaining…