It’s a hard road to economic health

In a highly publicized speech at the end of July 2004, Maronite Patriarch Cardinal Nasrallah Butros Sfeir called on the government to review the minimum wage in Lebanon (which currently sits at $200 per month, 40% lower in real terms, than the minimum wage of 40 years ago) and pleaded for improved living conditions, which are pushing thousands of Lebanese to seek new lives abroad. Sfeir’s call for economic reform came on the heels of headlines splashed across the front page of leading newspapers that almost 90% of the Lebanese population falls below the internationally recognized poverty line – a statistic, released in the wake of Mercer Consulting’s equally gloomy March 2004 survey, which ranked Beirut as the 37th most expensive city in the world, the only city in the Middle East (aside from Tel Aviv) to place in the top 50. Beirut, it said, was more expensive than San