Reading Time: 11 minutes They want to bring jobs to jobs-starved Lebanon. They also want to do something that has been tried many times and rarely been crowned by success: mobilize direct investments into Lebanon from the country’s large global diaspora. Specifically, they want to seed job investments—work opportunities that can be located anywhere in the world, yet be…
LAU study on COVID-19 spread estimates extreme social distancing could save 150,000 lives
Reading Time: 5 minutes On March 19, the Office of Graduate Studies and Research at the Lebanese American University (LAU) released the results of a study (see below) on the effects of different levels of social distancing on the number of COVID-19 related deaths by June in Lebanon. One note of caution for these figures is that the lack…
Q&A with Nassib Ghobril on Lebanon’s eurobonds
Reading Time: 8 minutes Lebanon is due to make a $1.2 billion principal eurobond payment on March 9, with opinions divided on whether to pay or put in place a plan to restructure the debt. As part of our coverage, Executive spoke via telephone with Nassib Ghobril, chief economist of the Byblos Bank Group, to find out why he…
Eugene Kaspersky on how to protect industry in the IoT age
Reading Time: 14 minutes On his first visit to Lebanon, Russian cybersecurity magnate Eugene Kaspersky divided his time between discussions with ministries, long-time banking clients, and visits to the country’s famed archeological sites. In between, he took time to sit down with a few media entities. In an interview that was arranged as a joint meeting of Kaspersky with…
A new legal class on digital
Reading Time: 11 minutes Political class is not always a flattering term. Actually, undercurrents of personal animosity and/or political criticism are endemic when discussions turn to the political class—in any country. In Lebanon, the most frequent connotations of the term appear to be wasta and corruption. Hailing from a political family is in this sense a definite reputational burden…
Interview with the new Lebanese minister of state for information technology and investment
Reading Time: 9 minutes Lebanon is well-acquainted with the true diaspora returnee: the individual born in Lebanon who departed at some point in the 20th century, who has one or multiple tertiary education degrees—often earned at a ranking European or American university—and who succeeded in his career abroad before returning to Lebanon, for reasons ranging from family responsibilities or/and…
An accumulation of economic woes
Reading Time: 7 minutes 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,…
Ziad Hayek discusses new PPP projects
Reading Time: 7 minutes 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’s housing authority to restart subsidization scheme
Reading Time: 5 minutes How far will LL100 billion go? That was the main question Executive posed to Rony Lahoud, head of Lebanon’s public housing authority, the Public Corporation for Housing (PCH). While there are still variables to be calculated, at the time of this interview in late October, Lahoud suggested that almost two thirds of the demand for…
Interview with Ziad Hayek, Secretary General of the High Council of Privatization and PPP
Reading Time: 11 minutes One observation that the World Bank’s latest economic monitor publication for the Middle East and North Africa conveyed to its faithful readers was that the internet infrastructure in MENA countries needs to be brought up to speed in order to facilitate better transitions into the digital economy. Published in early October, the monitor highlighted the…
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