Lebanon releases the 2019 citizen budget

ENAR

The 2019 budget law was subject to long debates that left citizens wondering about the ways the budget would affect their lives. It is a daunting task to make sense of the 1,000 plus black and white pages filled with complex tables, numbers, and graphs. To help non-specialists understand the information in the budget law, for a second consecutive year, the finance ministry has committed to releasing a  “citizen budget” that breaks down the country’s fiscal situation. The 2019 document is scheduled to be accessible as of early September on the Ministry of Finance’s website and the website of the affiliated Institut des Finances Basil Fuleihan. It is also available in hard copies in Arabic, French, and English at the institute’s Library of Finance. The citizen budget presents the following four core considerations in easy-to-understand language: economic assumptions underlying the 2019 budget—expectations about economic growth and inflation, and predictions about