The purpose of this Investment Climate Assessment (ICA) is to provide the Syrian government, as well as business leaders, with a rigorous empirical analysis of the investment climate in Syria and the factors influencing firm-level productivity and competitiveness. This analysis will be used to...

There are many reasons to believe that Syrian agriculture has great potential for the future. The liberalisation of agriculture in Eastern Europe delivered rapid growth in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Countries such as Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Hungary, Kazachstan, Romania and...

To provide a solid basis to define its needs and frame its priorities in terms of the specific assistance it seeks from the international community as well as to inform its own domestic policy response, the Government of Lebanon (GoL) requested the World Bank to lead an Economic and Social...

The Arab Spring protests marked the beginning of a new era in the Syrian Arab Republic in 2011. Minor public protests began almost immediately after the initial protests in Cairo in January 2011. The first large demonstrations began two months later in March, and the following months saw a...

Syria made promotion of non-oil exports one of the main objectives of its development strategy to counter the emerging twin balance of payments and fiscal deficits resulting from secular decline of oil production and exports. To realize this objective, the Government has implemented a number of...

The report's objective is to analyze key issues and constraints facing the sector, and propose a set of recommendations and possible areas of support by the World BankHowever, several data gaps exist. Many technical estimates are thus preliminary and incorporate a high degree of uncertainty due...

Following the magnitude (Mw) 7.8 Türkiye-Syria Earthquake on February 6, 2023, and the (Mw) 6.3 earthquake on February 20, 2023, the World Bank launched the Syria Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (RDNA). The objective of the RDNA is to estimate the impact of the earthquake on physical assets...

The World Bank's teams have been resorting to the use of a mix of standard tools and innovative geospatial and remote-based data sources (e.g., nighttime lights, shipping-position data, traffic congestion data, aviation statistics, mobile phone location data, remote sensing vegetation indices,...

Twelve years into a devastating civil war, a one-in-two-century earthquake devastated northwestern Syria. The 7.6 Richter scale shock was the deadliest in Syria after the one that hit Aleppo in 1822. Using novel data sources, such as big data, this Syria Economic Monitor analyzes what happens to...

Now moving into its twelfth year, the conflict in Syria has inflicted a devastating impact on the inhabitants and the economy. Beyond the immediate impact of the conflict, the economy suffers from the compounding effects of the pandemic, adverse weather events, regional fragility, and...