"Over the past decades, the Lebanese economy has grown at a moderate but low quality pace due to large, frequent and mostly 'political' shocks. Real GDP grew on average by 4.4 percent from 1992 to 2014 but this performance masks sharp sudden growth stops, to which the economy has been resilient. With low growth quality, Lebanon has struggled to reduce widespread poverty and to generate inclusive growth as job creation has been weak.
The World Bank's Systematic Country Diagnostic (SCD) posits that, at the root of Lebanon's failure to generate inclusive growth and jobs, are the presence of two mutually reinforcing and pervasive (overarching) constraints. These are Elite capture hidden behind the veil of confessionalism / confessional governance, and Conflict and violence (partly stemming from the broader dynamics of the Middle East conflict). These overarching constraints impose a heavy economic burden, with the cost of confessional governance estimated at 9 percent of GDP annually. Si
