A look into Lebanon’s healthcare Health encapsulates economic activity that amounts to trillions of dollars by the—in this context crude—methodology of collating production of goods and services as gross domestic product (GDP). The Global Health Observatory of the World Health Organization (WHO) puts the world’s expenditure on health at $7.2 trillion (2015 estimate), or 10 percent of the world’s GDP.…… Read More
A good summer? The celebration of Eid el-Fitr on June 16 marked the beginning of summer 2018 in Lebanon. As the season kicks off, all those in the tourism industry are speculating over whether it will be as good a season as summer 2017, or whether tourism will take a turn back to the bleak summer days of…… Read More
Buoyed by banks The relationship between the Lebanese economy and its banks is not quite as simple as the numbers suggest. Banking aggregates are improving every year. But the economy in Lebanon cannot be assumed to be sturdy just because the banking sector is jogging on and on. There are far too many risks and alarm signals on…… Read More
In the fog Assessing the insurance industry of Lebanon at the current junction of global insurance challenges, regional vagaries, domestic economic hurdles, and the country’s ongoing political issues is not without difficulty. Just as with the national economy, there are hopes and interesting prospects, but they are mainly just over the horizon—whether in the reconstruction of war-torn Syria…… Read More
A litmus test in Paris April 6 could be a very good Friday for Lebanon. Not only does it unofficially usher in the fruit season, a symbol of renewal and rebirth, but it is also the day that state officials will pitch a set of large-scale infrastructure projects to the international community and investors at the CEDRE conference in Paris.…… Read More
Moving into a new world of parliamentary participation At the end of February 2018, German women did it again. Chancellor Angela Merkel—supposedly the most powerful woman in the world, if one believes Forbes—won her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party’s election overwhelmingly to form a coalition government with the Social Democratic Party (SDP), which had been hotly debated at the party and national level…… Read More
The crypto challenge For years, the world has been engulfed in accelerating debates full of fear and fascination about Bitcoin, altcoins, and blockchain economies. Just look at January 2018, which brought threats and announcements of state regulation over cryptocurrency in some jurisdictions, bans of exchanges, rumors of impending restrictions alongside news pointing to the opposite, reporting on both…… Read More