The crisis that #Lebanon is going through has not witnessed anything similar in its history since independence until today, and the many comments of political commentators and economic specialists add frightening dimensions to the climate of indecision.
In this article, we want to present common mistakes that have come to represent the convictions of ordinary Lebanese who are unfamiliar with economic affairs.
The first and worst of these rumors is that the national income has reached the level of $22 billion, which is equivalent to 40% of the estimated national income level in 2018 at $55 billion.
The reason for the error in estimation is that the study of vital statistics is not conducted by political commentators, just as economists do not calculate the size of the informal economy and its impact on income levels and levels of sufficiency. How can an estimate of the informal economy be actually accomplished, and we estimate it at 30% of the national income because this economy includes The economy of drug production and trade includes importing and exporting oil derivatives over a period of two or three years and supporting these imports and then exporting them to Syria. Lebanon’s imports of derivatives amounted to about 4.8 billion dollars in 2013, and in 2014 they amounted to 8.8 billion dollars. One of the major derivatives traders is the reasons for the discrepancy, and when the World Bank experts inquired about the reason, they were informed that the difference in prices is due to the continuation of importing the same quantities and then exporting 35-40% of them to Syria.
In addition to the leakage of subsidized derivatives at that time to Syria, the pressure on the Lebanese balance of payments was great to import the same quantities, but the return from selling 30-40% was not available to Lebanon, although part of it was available because one of the major oil dealers in Syria owned 20% of the shares of a bank In Lebanon, he used to brag every year that he was the bank that opened the largest credits for oil imports.
Today, we see manifestations of manipulating numbers through programs devoted to discussing economic affairs. It is well known that the MTV station has become, with the diversity of its programs, the first in terms of audiovisual media, and the owners of the station are taking the initiative to support public affairs with donation campaigns for those suffering from diseases that require treatment abroad, and they are contributing with the Ministry of Works to bury potholes that damage cars and impede traffic.
MTV has introduced an economic program that is presented for a period of 5 minutes every day by a modest, elegantly dressed woman with hand gestures trying to explain the reasons for the deterioration of the economy. For example, a while ago, I mentioned figures on imports and figures on exports, and the discrepancy between them, and from here I concluded that the national income declined strongly, as if imports and exports constitute the elements for determining national income, and they exceeded the impact of public sector expenditures, which equal 70% of the figure provided for national income. At the same time, it did not remember or neglected to mention the impact of financial and investment transfers, which have always been the mainstay of the Lebanese economy.
Recently, I dealt with the numbers of the Social Security Fund, and I took the initiative to say that the fund’s resources are obtained from the contributions paid by employers for their workers, and the part that is available from the workers, and it did not indicate that the state is obliged to cover a significant percentage of the costs of the illness and maternity branch, which is the largest branch in number Those affiliated with it, all she said was that the state owed 5,000 billion LL without mentioning that these are basic contributions from the social security system and without mentioning that the sickness and maternity branch covers about 1.5 million Lebanese men and women, while end-of-service compensation does not cover more than 150 thousand Lebanese men and women .
Comments of the aforementioned type are extremely necessary because they do not show the reality of financial obligations and the percentage of beneficiaries from them. The surprising thing is that the program was introduced as if it was developed to cover a lack of economic media, bearing in mind that MTV has the best introduction to economic affairs in Lebanon and has had a lot of experience working in television. #The Arabian Gulf.
And let’s not forget that Marcel Ghanem’s program sometimes raises basic economic issues and has a number of commentators, some of whom deserve to be heard and others deserve to be punished by being sent to colleges to teach economics and business affairs… And the Lebanese listener bears the fragments of the non-economists’ mistakes.