In April 2018, the CEDRE conference was held in Paris to provide financial assistance to Lebanon to cope with its economic problems that were aggravated by the inflows of more than one million Syrian refugees to the country. The conference pledged close to $11 billion in loans and grants to Lebanon, conditional on the implementation of economic and governance reforms. Ideally, it would have been best to study the impact of these funds using a general macroeconomic model for the country, but unfortunately such an endeavor is not possible because of data limitations, both across time and across relevant variables. What we intend to do instead is to develop partial equilibrium “back of the envelop” estimates of the impact of these funds on major economic aggregates, namely tax revenues, merchandise imports, and private loans and deposits.
For the full report, click on the link below: