The Lebanon Economic Monitor provides an update on key economic developments and policies over the past six months. It also presents findings from recent World Bank work on Lebanon. It places them in a longer-term and global context and assesses the implications of these developments and other...

The election of President Michel Aoun in October 2016 after almost two and a half years of a presidential vacancy, and the subsequent formation of a national unity government have generated hope for the resuscitation of the political process in Lebanon. Nonetheless, the protracted Syrian...

The systemic failure of Lebanon's banking system and the collapse of the currency have resulted in a large, dollarized cash-based economy, worth an estimated USD 9.86 billion or 45.7 percent of GDP in 2022 (Special Focus: Gauging the Size of the Cash Economy in Lebanon). A pervasive and growing...

Weak economic statistics in Lebanon impede economic analysis and decision making. This paper presents a new coincident indicator and a leading indicator for the Lebanese economy. A new methodology, based on the National Bureau of Economic Research-Conference Board approach, was used to construct...

This paper uses a global computable general-equilibrium framework with new detail on six Levant countries-the Arab Republic of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab Republic, and Turkey-to quantify the direct and indirect economic effects of the Syrian war and the advance of the Islamic...

This paper attempts to identify Lebanon's greatest constraints to economic growth, following a growth diagnosis approach. It concludes that fiscal imbalances and barriers to entry are most binding on long-term growth. Macroeconomic imbalances and related perceived risks affect the nature of...

The book focuses on the largest refugee crisis of our time: the Syrian refugee crisis. It exploits a wealth of survey and registry data on Syrian refugees living in Jordan and Lebanon to assess their poverty and vulnerability status, understand the predictors of these statuses, evaluate the...