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  • Economical situation in Lebanon

What do you think about business in Lebanon recently? Some people telling me it is awful, some people tell it is just slight decline.
I can still see new cars at neighbours appearing and people still buying expensive things.
Your opinion?
You'll live your life in nothing but debt.
Money laundering, corruption.."Wasta", and other forms of illegal money gains keep the economy (and banks) fresh with cash.
Lebanon economy is based on Tourism(services), it doesn't require a lot of calculation to realize that the economy have been really bad and is getting worst due to the deterioration of security.

In reality there is no economy, just bunch of people open companies to hide their money laundry ways.

I just read an article about Lebanon budget deficit.
Lebanon economy is growing, as opposed to "developed countries"
But lack of oversight and chaos makes for bad working conditions, exploitation, bad quality work, and political situation discourages investing and long term thinking.
rolf wroteLebanon economy is growing, as opposed to "developed countries"
What makes you think that O.o
rtp wrote
rolf wroteLebanon economy is growing, as opposed to "developed countries"
What makes you think that O.o
GDP growth, for one thing?
Lebanon has no "economy", and its not subject to economical indicators.
Money laundry, corruption, 3omala for all the countries in the world.

But anyways, the things we call economy in lebanon is shitty right now and its declining
By the way, for people who think tourism makes a difference they are totaly wrong. Not in terms of econmy strucutre nor in terms of dollar amount of revenue made out of this tourism.
Tourism keeps the interests of some powerfull politicians.
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Well contrary to popular beliefs, the country is built on services. For example, the banking sector in Lebanon is huge with balance sheets of some banks posting bigger than most of you think kind of numbers. Sorry i don't have exact figures but their big.
I think Audi has assets in excess of 5 bils.

The country is in debt yes. But thats also the case for 90% of the world. I am mentioning this because most people think its unusual for a country to be in debt.

Corruption and money disappearing is a given. Its mostly politicians and other powerful individuals who run the show.

To sum it up, the country has a lot of potential but the main problem is the lack of expertise and planning. We all have ideas that could benefit the country but for your idea to get somewhere it has to go through some idiot who might not like it and even if he does he has to get the acceptance of whoever minister or member of parliament who might decline it if for example he sees no benefit for himself.
There's a lot of unfounded claims in this thread. The old "lebanon is corrupt" blah blah that we hear all the time, of course not supported by any source...

And then there's me, trying to bring in GDP - which is a valid source, but I did check out the GDP and growth is not that great - around 3%. It if better then lots of developed coutries - Canada, US, France, Spain - but far less than economies such as China (around 9% growth) and Indian...

So the Lebanese Economy is not the bomb (and maybe that is due to bombs) but it has an acceptable growth rate when you look at the global picture, and especially when taking into consideration the adverse conditions - that is the Syrian problem and regular bombs and other things that usually set back the economy . So that is not a fast growth but a resilient growth.

Personally, I am under the impression, after staying in Lebanon for years, that one of the depressing things there, business-wise, is the limited market of rather small size, if any such thing can be said.

Regarding banks and the debt, I was watching an interview with Fawwaz Traboulsi (political science teacher at LAU), and he mentioned he debt, how it skyrocketed in the early nineties - and that seems to concur with a huge spike in GDP growth (10%!) at that time, and how the debt is very high (it is actually quite high - in relation with GDP and population, but I forgot the exact number), and how most of it is debt to local banks, who are in turn controlled by wealthy Lebanese (sometimes politicians) - and this is how they can partly control the country. I thought that was an interesting information worth relaying here, since we're on that topic.