Great advice with side effects of confusion
Experts tackle Lebanon’s dilemmas with a plethora of rescue plans
of political intent for government formation plus the correlated vain media speculations, everything looked unhappily fluid. Even the weather fell in line, with an overload of cold, drenching rain that extended over the New Year into the second week of January.
To add to it, the thawra (revolution)—by early January appearing increasingly amorphous to the observer—seemed to vacillate in wild contradictions between justified political outrage on one day, a destructionist approach to, admittedly easily criticized, political efforts the second, and violent rioting in apparently instigated attempts to smash civil peace on the third.
The most solid prospects at hand in the middle of all the shakiness curiously appear to have the substance of paper. More precisely, a hope of solidity for the country emerged in form of economic rescue plans. Such plans have been presented in the past weeks in the public debating square—and arguably the discussion of these papers has become the biggest opportunity for progress in rescuing the country.
This is because both the political camp and the protest camp—at least until the middle of the third week of the month—seemed to have only a universal failure to deliver working solutions for the economy in common, as long as the former kept playing the usual power distribution game and parts of the latter stayed enraptured in drumming out-of-theworld demands for the immediate change of everything.
CARELESS OR SINCERE?
Although many of the new proposals have been penned by impressive collectives of economists in collaboration with private sector stakeholders or by individuals with excellent credentials, questions necessarily arise about their content, approach, and compatibility. Being presented with a variety of action plans, emergency solutions, and salvation concepts for the political economy does, in this sense, constitute its own element of risky fluidity— there is a great need for assessment and comparison.
Assessing a wide variety of plans would be easy and enjoyable if it did not come with the backdrop of a serious and life-threatening affliction for Lebanon. These plans do not just speculate about an impending large recession in the way that economists everywhere do at least once each quarter by virtue of their trade. Before they offer their medicine for Lebanon’s economic resuscitation, the plans raise specters of an economic meltdown and even greater social disaster. The issue is not about personal taste, but about determining—to the best of stakeholders’ ability—which formula for economic salvation is the one with the best chances of working.
This need is made no less challenging by the realization that there is no room for trying out which rescue plan might be the perfect one. All would-be rescuers of the country’s economic and social state have only one desperate shot to find the remedy that delivers the best results. approximately 30 percent of its content to descriptions of the current problems and possible disastrous outcomes, over 60 percent to its remedy proposal, and less than 10 percent to its assessment of what led to the crisis.
As to the latter issue, the authors declare the crisis categorically to be “as its core, a governance crisis emanating from a dysfunctional sectarian
All would-be rescuers of the country’s economic and social state have only one desperate shot to find the remedy that delivers the best results.
A MATTER OF VARIABLES AND APPROACHES
The first large variation between the economic plans exists in the proportions to which analysis of “what went wrong” is juxtaposed with descriptions of impending threats and the proposed remedy. Some plans give very short shrift to the discussion of reasons for the crisis of 2019. A paper published on January 6 by 10 individual signatories under the umbrella of the Carnegie Middle East Foundation, for example, dedicates system that hindered rational policymaking and permitted a culture of corruption and waste.” They proceed to say—in many ways accurately, but also in somewhat simplified manner—that Lebanon, “led by the public sector, lived beyond its means,” and they blame the economy’s high debt and “bloated banking sector” on this model having been pursued over decades.
Barely more elaborate on the deep background of current misery, the Lebanese International Financial Executives (LIFE) organization says in its economic rescue paper, published in October 2019, that “Lebanon appears to be heading towards an economic meltdown with severe consequences for Lebanese citizens of all walks of life.”
While emphasizing that it promoted approaches to solve the crisis for the past two years, LIFE highlights that current challenges to Lebanon “include a large and increasing debt load, spiraling fiscal and current account deficits, waning investment confidence, increasing political gridlock and external liquidity shortages,” but does not venture further into the history that led to their rise.