Abstract
Besides the fiscal policy card, a government anywhere in the world has a less “popular” yet equally powerful tool to preserve and nurture national economic growth. It is the ability to design, run, and enforce an inclusive “business climate” that can kick-start business cycles, to render the economy more self-sufficient and investors more confident, all within the contemporary framework of cross-border exchange and cyber openness.
The ‘Doing Business’ Project of the World Bank Group initiated since 2002 offers quantitative measures of business regulation at international, regional, and sub-national levels. Recently, it published the report ‘Lebanon’s Doing Business 2018’, alongside interesting national data sets evaluating the business and regulatory environments in Lebanon in 2017 and 2016. This study analyses the measures in 10 regulatory areas that are key to the functioning of the private sector. They help assess Lebanon’s “ease of doing business” (EODB). The study’s key inferences reveal an unhealthy deterioration in the ranking of Lebanon since 2016 to-date on almost 10 out of 11 indicators measured, compared to past years as well as to its regional peers. The deterioration may also be linked to the slowdown witnessed in the economy today.
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