In November 2023, four years after the start of Lebanon’s severe financial crisis, Harvard Growth Lab suggested that Lebanon consider adopting full dollarization among other economic and financial restructuring and reforms. In practice, a full dollarization consists of renouncing both the Lebanese central bank, Banque du Liban, and its monetary policy, and replacing the local currency—Lebanese pounds—with a foreign one, namely the US dollar. Such a suggestion has always been criticized and rejected by the public, the media, activists and non-experts who argue that dollarization would undermine ..read more

Food security is a prerequisite for any people’s sovereignty. The need for food’s physical and mental sustenance affects every human being with an existential might. It consequently ranks in import perhaps second only after the need for a planetary home with breathable air and stable gravity. This foundational necessity, however, has only at the end of the 20th century been accentuated into a universal imperative for the world’s societies.  The global age’s second gathering dedicated to this imperative, the 1996 World Food Summit produced pledges by 185 nations that they would strive to e ..read more

Across the globe, access to reliable and affordable energy underpins the very fabric of society. The International Energy Agency (IEA), a leading intergovernmental organization on energy, defines energy security as the “uninterrupted availability of energy sources at an affordable price.” For Lebanon, however, with its long-plagued energy sector, continuous and financially accessible energy remains a distant dream. For years, the nation has grappled with rolling blackouts, crippling infrastructure, and a dependence on volatile import markets, leaving its citizens and businesses in the perpetua ..read more

There is no denying that Lebanon’s territorial sovereignty has especially in recent months been heavily violated. Not a dozen or a hundred times, mind you; it has been transgressed against to the point where numbers have become so routine as to be meaningless. Lebanese finds itself again as the playing field of international powers at the expense of its own sovereignty.  Yet, not only have the daily violations of this country’s territory, carried out with no regard for human lives and material damages, climbed to their highest peaks in decades. In facing the transgressions against its sov ..read more

Crisis situations are nothing if not an opportunity for change. In this sense acting as a supreme motivating force for change, the economic crisis was expanded by a national security crisis and threat to sovereignty of Lebanon. In the 2023/24 issue of Executive, we explore the magazine’s consultative Economic Roadmap under a perspective of building security and ultimately a new expression of sovereignty that is both networked and interdependent, instead of being defined as indivisible and territorial.  Economy is the aspect of a polity that is always in flux. By definition, economy is nev ..read more

The Executive Roadmap is a dynamic, consultative and collaborative undertaking that documents solutions and bundles of measures which are seen as answers to Lebanon’s economic and structural woes by committed residents from many walks of life. To the best of the editors’ knowledge, the Roadmap is the longest-running, often relayed on or copied, and most crowd-sourced economic plan under publication in Lebanon. It also is distinct in its origins and character from rescue plans that were conceived in public sector, business community and civil society contexts of the country’s acute economic cri ..read more

Lamentations over the state of the world, the ongoing extinction of a Mediterranean conurbation, and the mass murder of a populace in our corner of the Middle East are currently ubiquitous on the world’s streets and in virtual public squares. In the global market place of opinions, minds are bombarded with both constant protests against war and genocide and constant hue and cry lambasting the parties bearing the blame of the ongoing armed conflicts.  From the vantage point of our small geopolitical neighborhood, this has the perverse effect that apparently vote-seeking philippics about co ..read more

The axiom of a strong correlation between the bank performance and the economy has now been thrown into question, as Lebanon’s banking sector continued to beat all odds with a stellar performance in 2006. The top three listed and privately-held banks reported strong results, but many experts warn that the sector will not be able to maintain this growth trajectory if the political deadlock is not broken and the reforms on which the Paris III loans were built are not implemented. The banking sector’s vital role in the economy came into sharp focus in 2006 after all listed banks—with the exceptio ..read more

An alternative to ineffective banking reforms and recovery plans The latest version of the bank resolution law has the same pitfalls as the previous ones. Mainly, the law proposed the creation of a committee entitled to determine which banks to be resolved and which to be restructured. The committee is composed of the central bank’s governor and vice governors as the main decision makers, which implies that Banque du Liban (BDL), the debtor, is determining the destiny of banks, the creditors. It is an absurd situation.  The decision-making process should be in the hands of an independent ..read more

Lebanon stands today at the crossroads of a more strenuous and challenging muddle-through phase on one hand, and progressive recovery on the other.  The road it will end up taking will ultimately depend on a series of sound and rational decisions, chief among which is the reform of the country’s taxation system. A new tax deal could ensure the country greater fiscal stability, allow for the funding of social programs, and rebuild trust between citizens and the government.  These policy objectives are fundamental if the country is to exit one of the worst financial crises of modern ti ..read more