“Lebanon Economy”
ANT 101: Cultural Anthropology
Leslie Ruff
October 30, 2008
Lebanon Economy
Lebanon is a republic on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea in Southwest Asia. Lebanon economy and markets are best described at the dawn of the new millennium by a private and liberal economic activity and openness to abroad with perfect capital and labor mobility (Wikipedia contributors). The Civil War Lebanon’s economy, cut it national output by half, and almost ended Lebanon’s position as a Middle East entrepot and banking hub. While trying to reconstruct its economy, it wanted to show the world that it does have a future of a nation. Economic recovery has been helped by a financially sound banking system, but the country also been set back by the war in 2006. Throughout the 1980s Lebanon was being written off as a nation, and there were reasons to think that they were going to break up into a number of mini-states. But this has not happened and the country is trying to rebuild as a new economy as a nation state. Throughout my paper I will discuss the different aspects of Lebanon economy such as agriculture, labour force, industry, finance.
From 1984 to 1987 there was little hope that reconstruction programs might be implemented to try and rebuild the country, but when the political situation started to drop, the economic status worsened. Lebanon had entered an era where reliable statistics on the state of the country were usually absent. The cost of basics, like gasoline, home fuel oil, and cooking gas were all subject to government price restraints. Prices could sometimes double or triple in times of shortage, as between refineries, gasoline pumps were cut off. High unemployment, shifts of population, and postponement of the reconstruction projects led to depression that brought the country to near collapse. Before 1975 Lebanon ranked as one of the 35 upper middle-income countries in the world. The countries economy was anchored in...