Revive Lebanon’s job market

ENAR

As part of Executive’s ‘10 Ways to Save Lebanon’ issue, we asked leading figures from a range of fields to put the case for one major changes for the country. In this article, former International Labor Organization advisor Zafiris Tzannatos discusses changes to the country’s job market.   At face value, Lebanon is probably the top economic and employment performer in the Arab region. Globally, it is an upper-middle-income country, one notch below the group of high-income economies. Within the Arab region, it has the highest per capita income among non oil-producing countries. It has the lowest unemployment rate — about 9 percent — in a region with an average of nearly 14 percent. This excludes the Gulf Cooperation Council, where unemployment is almost zero by virtue of oil wealth and the government being an employer of last resort. Moreover, the Lebanese education system produces graduates who can find jobs in the