Financial correction program 1998-1999

August 2003

This work constitutes the first attempt ( and probably the most serious until now) to present a detailed, quantified and scheduled action plan aiming at correcting the serious distortions that affect public finance in Lebanon. It has been carried, on a voluntary basis, by the author and Makram Sader (with the assistance of Iskandar Moukarbel and some young economists), in the end of 1998 and in the beginning of 1999 and submitted to the Lebanese Government who constituted a Ministerial Commission that held regular weekly meetings to discuss it.

It was approved, in a modified and sometimes distorted version by the Council of Ministers but was not applied apart from selective measures taken by that same Government or by the various subsequent ones, with years of delay (while problems were aggravating dangerously):

The document has been published in 2003, accompanied by a detailed study of the conditions of its elaboration, the circumstances and the reasons of the failure of the attempt of reform and an analysis of the subsequent economic and political developments, under the title “The chances of avoiding the crisis and the conditions of overcoming it; story of an attempt of reform” (in Arabic), Dar al Nahar, August 2003, 327p.