‘Lebanon’s statistics are unreliable’

ENAR

Despite serving 25 years with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Mounir Rached bucks the stereotype of the cosseted economist for whom statistics are sacrosanct. Although his new office in the Ministry of Finance is littered with economic studies and proposals, he gives the impression of distrusting most of them. Searching through stacks of papers, he says many of Lebanon’s statistics are unreliable. “We have statistics issued in an IMF document showing that…from 2000 to 2005 we having cumulative inflation of only 1.5 percent. How can that be possible?” Skepticism, he says, is key to understanding Lebanese economic figures. “In Lebanon some people collect statistics when they are sitting at home,” he half-jokes. That same critical eye must be applied to Lebanon’s main inflation measure – the consumer price index (CPI). Last week Executive revealed that, because of a dispute between the government and the Central Administration of Statistics (CAS), no